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Proleoromena to the 
Study of Greek Religion 



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Prolegomena to the 
Study of Greek Religion 



by 
JANE ELLEN HARRISON, 

HON. D.LITT. (DURHAM), HON. LL.D. ABERDEEN, 

STAFF LECTURER AND SOMETIME FELLOW OF NEWNHAM COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, 

CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE GERMAN ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE 



SECOND EDITION 



Cambridge : 

at the University Press 

1908 



First Edition 1903. 
Second Edition 1908. 



SRLF 
URL 



"?-/ 



ARTURO ET MARGARITAE VERRALL 

HUIC AMICAE MEAE CONSTANTISSIMAE 
ILLI ET AMICO ET MAGISTEO 

HUNG LIBRUM DEDICO 



INTRODUCTION. 



The object of the following pages is to draw attention to 
some neglected aspects of Greek religion. 

Greek religion, as set forth in popular handbooks and even in 
more ambitious treatises, is an affair mainly of mythologj^, and 
moreover of mythology as seen through the medium of literature. 
In England, so far as I am aware, no serious attempt has been 
made to examine Greek ritual. Yet the facts of ritual are more 
easy definitely to ascertain, more permanent, and at least equally 
significant. What a people does in relation to its gods must 
always be one clue, and perhaps the safest, to what it thinks. 
The first preliminary to any scientific understanding of Greek 
religion is a minute examination of its ritual. 

This habit of viewing Greek religion exclusively througii 
the medium of Greek literature has brought with it an initial 
and fundamental error in method — an error which in England, 
where scholarship is mainly literary, is likely to die hard. For 
literature Homer is the beginning, though every scholar is aware 
that he is nowise primitive ; for theology, or — if we prefer so to 
call it — mythology. Homer presents, not a starting-pi)int, but 
a culmination, a complete achievement, an almost mechanical 
accomplishment, with scarcely a hint of origines, an accomplish- 
ment moreover, which is essentially literary rather than religious, 
sceptical and rnoribuinl ah-eady in its very perfection. The 
Olympians of Ifomer are no more juimitive than liis hexameters. 
Beneath this splendid surface lies a stratum of religious concejitions, 
ideas of evil, of purification, of atonement, ignored or sni)pn'ssfd 
by Honjer, but reappearing in later poets and notalily in 
Aeschylus. It is this substratum of religions conceptions, at 
once more primitive and more permanent, that 1 am concerned 

ab 



viii Introduction 

to investigate. Had ritual received its due share of attention, 
it had not remained so long neglected. 

I would guard against misapprehension. Literature as a 
starting-point for investigation, and especially the poems of 
Homer, I am compelled to disallow ; yet literature is really 
my goal. I have tried to understand primitive rites, not from 
love of their archaism, nor yet wholly from a single-minded 
devotion to science, but with the definite hope that I might 
come to a better understanding of some forms of Greek poetry. 
Eeligious convention compelled the tragic poets to draw their 
plots from traditional mythology, from stories whose religious 
content and motive were already in Homer's days obsolete. 
A knowledge of, a certain sympathy with, the milieu of this 
primitive material is one step to the realization of its final form 
in tragedy. It is then in the temple of literature, if but as 
a hewer of wood and drawer of water, that I still hope to 
serve. 

As the evidence to be set before the reader is necessarily 
somewhat complex in detail, and the arguments of the successive 
chapters closely interdependent, it may be well at the outset to 
state, as simply as may be, the conclusions at which I have 
arrived, and to summarize briefly the steps of the discussion. 

In Chapter I. it is established that the Greeks themselves 
in classical times recognized two forms of ritual, Olympian and 
Chthonic. It is further seen that the characteristic ritual of 
Homeric days was of the kind known to them as Olympian. 
Sacrifice in Homer takes the form of an offering to the god 
to induce his favour. Its formulary is do ut des. Moreover the 
sacrificial banquet to which the god is bidden is shared by the 
worshipper. In sharp contradistinction to this cheerful sacrificial 
feast, when we examine the supposed festival of Zeus at Athens, 
the Diasia, we find rites of quite other significance ; the sacrifice 
is a holocaust, it is devoted, made over entirely to the god, 
unshared by the worshipper, and its associations are gloomy. The 
rites of the Diasia, though ostensibly in honour of Zeus, are found 
really to be addressed to an underworld snake on whose worship 
that of Zeus has been superimposed. 

In the three chapters that follow, on the festivals of the 



Introduction 



IX 



Anthesteria, Thargelia, and Thesmophoria, held respectively in 
the spring, summer, and autumn, the Olyinpian ritual super- 
imposed is taken as known and only alluded to in passing. 
The attention is focussed on the rites of the underlying stratum. 

In the Anthesteria, ostensibly sacred to Dionysos, the main 
ritual is found to be that of the placation of ghosts. Ghosts, it is 
found, were placated in order that they might be kept aw^iy; the 
formulary for these rites is not, as with the Olympians, do ut des, 
but do ut abeas. The object of these rites of Aversion, practised 
in the spring, is found to be strictly practical ; it is the promotion 
of fertility by the purgation of evil influences. 

The ritual of the Thargelia is even more primitive and 
plain-spoken. In this festival of the early summer, ostensibly 
dedicated to Apollo, the first-fruits of the harvest are gathered 
in. The main gist of the festival is purification, necessary as 
a preliminary to this ingathering. Purification is effected by the 
ceremonial of the pharmakos. Though the festival in classical 
days was ' sacred to ' Apollo, the pharmakos is nowise a ' human 
sacrifice ' to a god, but a direct means of physical and moral 
purgation, with a view to the promotion and conservation of 
fertility. 

Thus far it will be seen that the rites of the lower stratum are 
characterized by a deep and constant sense of evil to be removed 
and of the need of purification for its removal ; that the means 
of purification adopted are primitive and mainly magical nowise 
affects this religious content. 

This practical end of primitive ceremonies, the promotion of fer- 
tility by magical rites, comes out still more strongly in the autumn 
sowing festival of the Thesmophoria. Here the women attempt, 
by carrying certain magical saa^a, the direct impulsion of nature. 
In connection with these sacra of the Thesmophoria the subject 
of 'mysteries' falls to be examined. The gist of all primitive 
mysteries is found to be the handling or tasting of certain sacra 
after elaborate purification. The sacra are conceived of as having 
magical, i.e. divine, properties. Contact with them is contact 
with a superhuman potency, which is taboo to the unpurilifd. 
The gist of a mystery is often the removal of a taboo. From llu* 
Olympian religion 'mysteries' appear to have been wliojly 
absent. 



X Introduction 

In Chapter V. we pass from ritual to theology, from an 
examination of rites performed to the examination of the beings 
to whom these rites were addressed. These beings, it is found, are 
of the order of sprites, ghosts, and bogeys, rather than of completely 
articulate gods, their study that of demonology rather than 
theology. As their ritual has been shown to be mainly that of the 
Aversion of evil, so they and their shifting attributes are mainly 
of malevolent character. Man makes his demons in the image 
of his own savage and irrational passions. Aeschylus attempts, 
and the normal man fails, to convert his Erinyes into Semnai 
Theai. 

In Chapter VI. the advance is noted from demonology to 
theology, from the sprite and ghost to the human and humane 
god. The god begins to reflect not only human passions but 
humane relations. The primitive association of women with 
agriculture is seen to issue in the figui'es of the Mother and 
the Maid, and later of the Mother and the Daughter, later still 
in the numerous female trinities that arose out of this duality. 
In Chapter VII. the passage from ghost to god is clearly seen, 
and the humane relation between descendant and ancestor begets 
a kindliness which mollifies and humanizes the old religion 
of Aversion. The culminating point of the natural development 
of an anthropomorphic theology is here reached, and it is seen that 
the goddesses and the ' hero-gods ' of the old order are, in their 
simple, non-mystic humanity, very near to the Olympians. 

At this point comes the great significant moment for Greece, 
the intrusion of a new and missionary faith, the religion of 
an immigrant god, Dionysos. 

In Chapter VIII. the Thracian origin of Dionysos is established. 
In his religion two elements are seen to coexist, the worship 
of an old god of vegetation on which was grafted the worship 
of a spirit of intoxication. The new impulse that he brought 
to Greece was the belief in enthusiasm, the belief that a man 
through physical intoxication at first, later through spiritual 
ecstasy, could pass from the human to the divine. 

This faith might have remained in its primitive savagery, 
and therefore for Greece ineffective, but for another religious 
impulse, that known to us under the name of Orpheus. To the 



Introduction 



XI 



discussion of Orphism the last four chapters IX. — XII. are de- 
voted. 

In Chapter IX. I have attempted to show that the name Orpheus 
stands for a real personality. I have hazarded the conjecture that 
Orpheus came from Crete bringing with him, perhaps ultimately 
from Egypt, a religion of spiritual asceticism which yet included 
the ecstasy of the religion of Dionysos. Chapter X. is devoted 
to the examination of the Orphic and Dionysiac mysteries. It has 
been shown that before the coming of the Orphic and Dionysiac 
religion the mysteries consisted mainly in the handling of certain 
sacra after elaborate purification. By handling these sacra man 
came into contact with some divine potency. To this rudimentary 
mysticism Orphism added the doctrine of the possibility of 
complete union with the divine. This union was effected in the 
primitive Cretan rite of the Omophagia by the physical eating 
of the god ; union with the divine was further symbolically 
effected by the rite of the Sacred Marriage, and union by adoption 
by the rite of the Sacred Birth. The mission of Orphism was 
to take these primitive rites, originally of the crudest sympathetic 
magic, and inform them with a deep spiritual mysticism. The rite 
of the Omophagia found no place at Eleusis, but the other two 
sacramental rites of union, the Sacred Marriage and the Sacred 
Birth, formed ultimately its central mysteries. 

With the doctrine and ritual of union with the divine there 
came as a necessary corollary the doctrine that man could attain 
the divine attribute of immortality. Orphic eschatology is the 
subject of Chapter XI. Its highest spiritual form, the belief 
that perfect purity issued in divinity and hence in immortality, 
is found expressed in the Orphic tablets. Its lower expression, 
the belief in a Hades of eternal punishment as contrasted with the 
shadowy after-world of Homer, is seen in the vases of Lower Italy 
and the eschatology denounced by Plato. 

Finally in Chapter XII. it is shown how, as a concomitant 
to their Eschatology, the Orphics, unlike Homer, developed a 
Cosmoo-ony, and with this Cosmogony was ultimately bound tip 
a peculiar and philosophic theology. In the fifth century U.c. 
the puppet-show of the Olympians was well-nigh pliiy.'d out, 
but the two gods of the Orphics remained potent. In ritual (hey 
worshipped Diony.sos, l)ut their thc(.rctical theology recognized 



xii Introduction 

Eros as source of all things. The Eros of the Orphics was a 
mystery-being, a daimon rather than a theos, a potency wholly 
alien to the clear-cut humanities of Olympus. 

With the consideration of Orphism it has become, I hope, 
abundantly clear why at the outset attention was focussed on the 
primitive rites of Aversion and Purification rather than on the 
Service of the Olympians. The ritual embodied in the formulary 
do lit des is barren of spiritual content. The ritual embodied 
in do ut abeas contains at least the recognition of one great 
mystery of life, the existence of evil. The rites of the Olympians 
were left untouched by the Orphics ; the rites of purification and 
of sympathetic magic lent them just the symbolism they needed. 
Moreover in theology the crude forms of demons were more pliant 
material for mysticism than the clear-cut limitations and vivid 
personality of the Olympians. Orphism was the last word of 
Greek religion, and the ritual of Orphism was but the revival of 
ancient practices with a new significance. 

The reader will note that in the pages that follow, two 
authors, Plutarch and Euripides, have been laid under special 
contribution. Plutarch's gentle conservatism made him cling 
tenaciously to antique faith. According to him, one function 
of religion was to explain and justify established rites, and in the 
course of his attempted justification he tells us many valuable 
ritual facts. Euripides, instant in his attack on the Olympian 
gods, yet treats with respect the two divinities of Orphism, 
Dionysos and Eros. I have suggested that, born as he was 
at Phlya, the ancient home of Orphic mysteries, his attitude 
on this matter may have been influenced by early associations. 
In any case, a religion whose chief divinities were reverently 
handled by Euripides cannot be dismissed as a decadent maleficent 
superstition. 

I would ask that the chapters I have written be taken strictly 
as they are meant, as Prolegomena. I am deeply conscious that 
in surveying so wide a field I have left much of interest un- 
touched, still more only roughly sketched in. I wished to present 
my general theory in broad outline for criticism before filling in 
details, and I hope in the future to achieve a study of Orphism 



Introduction xiii 

that may have more claim to completeness. If here I have 
dwelt almost exclusively on its strength and beauty, I am not 
unaware that it has, like all mystical religions, a weak and 
ugly side. 

If in these Prolegomena I have accomplished anything, this 
is very largely due to the many friends who have helped me; 
the pleasant task remains of acknowledging my obligations. 

My grateful thanks are offered to the Syndics of the 
University Press for undertaking the publication of this book ; 
to the Syndics of the University Library and the Fitzwilliam 
Museum for the courtesy they have shown in allowing me free 
access to their libraries ; to ni}^ own College, which, by electing 
me to a Fellowship, has given me for three years the means and 
leisure to devote myself to writing. 

For the illustrations they have placed at my disposal I must 
record my debt to the Trustees of the British Museum, to the 
Hellenic Society, the German Archaeological Institute, and the 
Ecole Fran^aise of Athens. The sources of particular plates are 
acknowledged in the notes. The troublesome task of drawing 
from photographs and transcribing inscriptions has been most 
kindly undertaken for me by Mrs Hugh Stewart. 

Passing to literary obligations, it will be evident that in 
the two first chapters I owe much, as regards philology, to the 
late Mr R A. Neil. His friendship and his help were lost to mc 
midway in my work, and that loss has been irreparable. 

It is a pleasure to me to remember gratefully that to Sir 
Richard Jebb I owe my first impulse to the study of Orphism. 
The notes in his edition of the Characters of Theophrastos first 
led me as a student into the by-paths of Orphic literature, 
and since those days the problem of ()r])hism, though often of 
necessity set aside, has never ceased to haunt me. 

To Professor Ridgeway I owe much more than can ap])ear 
on the surface. The material for the early portion of my book 
was collected many years ago, but, baffled by the ethnological 
problems it suggested, I laid it aside in despair. The appeanince 
of Professoi- Ridgeway's article, ' What peoi)le made the objects 
called Mycenaean ? ' threw to me an instant flood of light on the 



xiv Introduction 

problems of ritual and mythology that perplexed me, and I returned 
to my work with fresh courage. Since then he has, with the 
utmost kindness, allowed me to attend his professorial lectures 
and frequently to refer to him my difficulties. I have thought 
it best finally to state my own argument independently of his 
ethnological conclusions, first because those conclusions are, at the 
time I write, only in part before the public, but chiefly because 
I hoped that by stating my evidence independently it might, 
in the comparatively narrow sphere in which I work, offer some 
slight testimony to the truth of his illuminating theories. 

To all workers in the field of primitive religion Dr Frazer's 
writings have become so part and parcel of their mental furniture 
that special acknowledgement has become almost superfluous. 
But I cannot deny myself the pleasure of acknowledging a deep 
and frequent debt, the more as from time to time I have been 
allowed to ask for criticism on individual points, and my request, 
as the notes will show, has always met with generous response. 

Mr F. M. Cornford of Trinity College has, with a kindness and 
patience for which I can offer no adequate thanks, undertaken the 
revision of ray proof-sheets. To him I owe not only any degree 
of verbal accuracy attained, but also, which is much more, 
countless valuable suggestions made from time to time in the 
course of my work. Many other scholars have allowed me to 
refer to them on matters outside my own competency. Some 
of these debts are acknowledged in the notes, but I wish specially 
to thank Dr A. S. Murray, Mr Cecil Smith and Mr A. H. Smith 
of the British Museunj for constant facilities afforded to me in my 
work there, and Mr R. C. Bosanquet and Mr M. Tod for help 
in Athens ; and, in Cambridge, Dr Haddon, Dr Hans Gadow, 
Mr Francis Darwin, Mr H. G. Dakyns and Mr A. B. Cook. 

My debt to Dr A. W. Verrall is so great and constant that 
it is hard to formulate. If in one part of my book more than 
another I am indebted to him it is in the discussion of the 
Erinyes. Chapter V. indeed owes its inception to Dr Verrall's 
notes in his edition of the CJwephoroi, and its final form to his 
unwearied criticism. Throughout the book there is scarcely a 
literary difficulty that he has not allowed me to refer to him, and 
his sure scholarship and luminous perception have dissipated for 
me many a mental fog. 



Introduction xv 

Mr Gilbert Murray has written for me the critical Appendix 
on the text of the Orphic tablets, a matter beyond my competence. 
Many verse translations, acknowledged in their place, are also by 
him, and uniformly those from the Bacchae and Hippolytus 
of Euripides. It is to Mr Murray's translation of the Bacchae 
that finally, as regards the religion of Dionysos, I owe most. The 
beauty of that translation, which he kindly allowed me to use 
before its publication, turned the arduous task of investigation 
into a labour of delight, and throughout the later chapters of the 
book, the whole of which he has read for me in proof, it will 
be evident that, in many difficult places, his sensitive and wise 
imagination has been my guide. 

Jane Ellen Harrison. 

Newxham College, Cambridge, 
September 9, 1903. 

In the second edition, errors to which the kindness of friends 
and reviewers has drawn my attention have been corrected. The 
tedious task of proof- revision has been again undertaken for me 
by Mr Cornford. For the index of Classical Passages I have to 
thank Mr F. C. Green of Trinity College. In the notes many 
new references have been added to literature that has appeared 
since my first edition. I would mention especially I)r Frazer's 
Early History of the Kingship and the invaluable Archiv fUr 
Religionswissenschaft, the issue of which in new form since 11)04 
marks a fresh departure in the study of religion. In my second 
edition however new material has been indicated rather than 
incorporated. Save for obvious corrections and added references 
the book remains substantially unaltered — not, I would ask my 
friends to believe, because in the lapse of four years my views 
remain the same, but because on some matters, especially on 
magic, mimetic ritual and the mysteries, I hope before long, in 
a volume of Epilegomena, to develope certain suggestions and to 
remedy many shortcomings. 

Jane Ellen Harrison. 

Newnham College, Cambridge. 
December , 1907. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER I. 

Olympian and Chthonic Ritual. 

Mr Ruskiri on the absence of fear in the Greek genius. Religion, to writers 
of the fifth century B.C., mainly a matter of festivals. In the Evihyphron 
religion is 'doing business with the gods,' a form of 'tendance' (depaTrfla). 
Contrast of 8fiai8aifiovia, ' fear of spirits.' Plutarch on ' fear of spirits.' 
Distinction drawn by Isocrates and others between Olympian and apotropaic 
ritual. Contrast between 'Tendance' (Ofpav-fia) and 'Aversion' {aTroTpoiri']). 
Sacrifice to Zeus in Homer is a banquet shared. Contrast of the ritual of 
the Diasia. The holocaust or uneaten sacrifice. Ritual of the Diasia addressed 
primarily to an underworld snake. Superposition of the Homeric Zeus. 
Evidence of art. The 'Dian' fleece, not the 'fleece of Zeus' but the fleece 
of magical purification. Examination of the Attic calendar. The names of 
festivals not connected with the names of Olympian divinities. The ritual of 
these festivals belongs to a more primitive stratum than that of the Olympians, 
pp. 1-.31. 

CHAPTER II. 
The Anthesteria. The Ritual of Ghosts and Sprites. 

The Anthesteria, ostensibly dedicated to Dionysos, a spring festival of the 
revocation and aversion of ghosts. Examination of the rites of the three days. 
Meaning of the Chytroi, the Choes and the Pithoigia. Derivation of the 
word Anthesteria. Rites of purgation among the Romans in February. The 
Feralia and Lupercalia. The ritual of ' devotion ' (fvayia-fioi). Contrast of 
dvfiv and (vayi^dv. The word Bvav used of Inirnt sacrifice to the Olympians, 
the word fvayi^av of 'devotion' to underworld deities. The ritual <»f iiirt'ivippa. 
Gist of the word (vayi(fiv is jnirgation by means of placation of gliosis. Cou- 
tra.st of lept'iov, tln! victim saci'ificod and eaten, witli (rf/jii-ytoi', the victim wicri- 
ficed and 'devoted.' The a-cfxiyin in use for the taking of oaths, P >r ] mrification, 
for omens, for sacrifice to winds and other undf'rworid powers. Elements of 
'tendance' in the ritual of 'aversion,' it|>. .32 — IH. 



xviii Table of Contents 



CHAPTER III. 

Harvest Festivals. The Thargelia, Kallynteria, Plynteria. 

The Thargelia au early summer festival of first-fruits. The Eiresione. 
Object of the offering of first-fruits a release from taboo. The Australian 
Intichiuma. Removal of taboo developes into idea of consecration, dedication, 
sacrifice. The material of sacrifice. The god fares as the worshipper, but 
sometimes, from conservatism, fares worse. Instances in ritual of survival of 
primitive foods. The ov\oxvrai, the pelanos and the nephalia. The fireless 
sacrifice. The bringing in of first-fruits preceded by ceremonies of purification. 
The pharmakos. Details of the ritual. The pharmakos only incidentally a 
' human sacrifice.' Its object physical and spiritual purgation. Meaning of 
the term. The pharmakos in Egypt, at Chaeronea, at Marseilles. Analogous 
ceremonies. The Charila at Delphi. The Bouphonia. The Stepterion. 
Further ceremonies of j^urification. The Kallynteria, Plynteria, Vestalia. 
General conclusion : in the Thargelia the gist of sacrifice is purification, 
a magical cleansing as a preparation for the incoming of first-fruits, 
pp. 77—119. 



CHAPTER IV. 

The Women's Festivals. Thesmophoria, Arrephoria, Skirophoria, 

Stenia, Haloa. 

Importance of these festivals as containing the germ of ' Mysteries.' 
Detailed examination of the ritual of the Thesmophoria. The Kathodos and 
Anodos, the Nesteia, the Kalligeneia. Gist of the rites the magical impulsion 
of fertility by burying sacra in the ground. Magical rites preceded by puri- 
fication and fasting. Analogy of Arrephoria, Skirophoria and Stenia with 
Thesmophoria. Meaning of the word Thesmophoria, the carrying of magical 
sMra. Magical spells, curses and law. deaixos and vojuoj. The curse and the 
law. The Dirae of Teos. The Haloa, a festival of the threshing-floor, later 
taken over by Dionysos. Tabooed foods. Eleusinian Mysteries a primitive 
harvest-festival. Order of the ritual. The pig of purification. Other rites 
of purification. The tokens of the mysteries. Ancient confessions rather of 
the nature of Confiteor than Credo. The fast and the partaking of the kykeon. 
The Kernophoria. Ancient mysteries in their earliest form consist of the 
tasting of first-fruits and the handling of sacra after preliminary purification, 
pp. 120—162. 



Table of Contents xix 

CHAPTER A^ 

The Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites and Bogeys. 

Primitive demonology constantly in flux. Various connotations of the 
word Ker. The Ker as evil sprite, the Ker as bacillus of disease. The Keres 
of Old Age and Death. The Ker as Harpy and Wind-Dai mon. The Ker as 
Fate in Homer and Hesiod. The Ker as Gorgon. Origin of the Gorgoneion. 
Apotropaic masks. The Gorgon developed from the Gorgoneion. The Graiae. 
The Evil Eye. The Ker as Siren. The Sirens of Homer. Problem of the bird- 
form in art. The Siren as midday daimon. The Siren on funeral monuments. 
The bird-form of the soul in Greece and Egypt. Plato's Sirens. The Ker as 
Sphinx. Mantic aspect of Sphinx. The Sphinx as Man-slaying Ker, as 
Funeral Monument. Tlie Ker as Erinys. The Erinyes as angry Keres. 
Erinys an adjectival epithet. The Erinyes primarily the ghosts of slain men 
crying for vengeance. The Erinyes developed by Homer and Herakleitos into 
abstract ministers of vengeance. The Erinyes of Aeschylus more primitive 
than the Erinyes of Homer. The blood-curse in the Choephoroi. The Erinyes 
of the stage. The Erinyes analogous to Gorgons and Harpies, but not 
identical. The wingless Erinyes of Aeschylus. The winged Erinyes of later 
art. The Poinae. The Erinys as snake. The Semnai Theai. New cult 
at Athens. New underworld ritual. The transformation of Erinyes 
into Semnai Theai. The Eumenides at Colonos, at Megalopolis, at Argos, 
pp. 163—256. 

CHAPTER VI. 
The Making of a Goddess. 

Anthropomorphism. Gradual elimination of animal forms. The gods 
begin to mirror human relations and at first those of 'matriarchal' type. The 
Mother and the Maid, two forms of one woman-goddess. The Great Mother as 
norma drjpoiv, as Kourotrophos. Influence of agriculture. Relation of women 
to primitive agriculture. Demeter and Kore as Mother and Maid rather than 
Mother and Daughter. Gradual predominance of the Maid over the Mother. 
The Anodos of the Maiden. Influence of mimetic agricultural rites. The 
evidence of vase-paintings. Pandora Mother and Maid. The iJesiodic sti>ry. 
The Maiden-Trinities. Origin of Trinities from the duality of Mother and 
Maid. K(jrai, Charites, Aglaurides, Nymphs. The Judgment of Paris a 
rivalry of three dominant Komi— Hera, Atliene and Ai)liroditc. Evidence of 
vase-])aintings. Development of Athene, her snake- and l)ird-f'orms. Atlicnc 
finally a frigid impersonation of Athens. J)evelopm(!nt of Aphrodite. Mytii 
of her sea-birth. Its origin in a ritual bath. The Ludovisi tlirono. Ultimate 
dominance of the mother-form of Aphrodite as (icnetrix. Hera a.s maiden. 
Her marriage with Zeus. Intrusion of Olympian 'patriarchal' cults on the 
worshij) of the Mother and the Maid. Evidence from ;ut, ]>\>. 257- 321. 



XX Table of Contents 



CHAPTER VII. 

The Making of a God. 

The passage from ghost to god more plainly seen in the cult of heroes 
than in that of heroines. Instances from heroine -worshi]). Helen and Hebe. 
The hero as snake. Origin of the bearded snake. Heroes called by adjectival 
ciiltus-titles rather than personal names. The 'nameless' gods of the 
Pelasgians. The name ' hero ' adjectival. Origin of supposed ' euphemistic ' 
titles. The ' Blameless ' Aigisthos. The ' Blameless ' Salmoneus. Antagonism 
between the gods proper of the Olympian system and local heroes. Benefi- 
cence of the heroes. Asklepios and the heroes of healing. Asklepios originally 
a hero-snake. Evidence of votive reliefs. Amynos and Dexion. The ' Hero- 
Feasts.' Cult of Hippolytus. Zeus Philios. Hero-Feasts lead to Theoxenia. 
Type of the Hero-Feast taken over by Dionysos. Evidence from reliefs, 
pp. 322—362. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

Dionysos. 

Mystical character of the religion of Dionysos. Dionysos an immigrant 
Thracian. The legend of Lycurgus. Historical testimony. In Euripides 
Dionysos an oriental. Explanation of apparent discrepancy. The Satyrs. 
Analogy with the Centaurs. The Satyrs represent an indigenous people who 
became worshippers of Dionysos. Cheiron the good Centaur. The Maenads 
not merely mythological. The Thyiades of historical times. The Maenads, 
Thyiades, Bacchants, women possessed by Dionysos. They are the nurses of 
the god and worship him as Liknites. Dionysos son of Semele. Semele the 
Earth-Mother. Cult of thunder-smitten places. Dionysos son of Zeus. Zeus 
adopts Dionysos as god of the grape. Examination of the titles Bromios, 
Braites, Sabazios. All three are titles of a god of a cereal intoxicant. The 
cereal intoxicant preceded in the North the intoxicant made from the grape. 
Tragedy the song of the cereal drink. Dionysos emerges from obscurity as 
god of the grape. Dionysos the tree and vegetation god. Evidence of art. 
The ' Principle of Moisture.' Dionysos the Bull-god. Animal incarnations. 
The ' return to nature.' Dithyrambos and the Dithyramb. Dithyrambos the 
Mystery-Babe. Plutarch on the Dithyramb. Possible association with the 
Bee-Maidens, the Thriae, Moderation of the Greek in the use of wine. Sacra- 
mentalism of eating and drinking. The ecstasy .of aceticism, pp. 363 — 453. 



Table of Contents xxi 



CHAPTER IX. 

Orpheus. 

Problem of relation between Orphens and Dionysos. Analogy and contrast 
between the two. Orpheus a Thracian ; a magical musician. Possible 
Cretan origin of Orpheus. The island route from Crete to Thrace. The 
death of Orpheus. Representations on vase-paintings. Orpheus an enemy of 
the Maenads. His burial and the cult at his tomb. His oi-acle at Lesbos. 
His relation to Apollo. Orpheus a real man, a reformer, and possibly a 
martyr ; heroized but never deified. Orpheus as reformer of Bacchic rites. 
Influence of Orphism at Athens. New impulse brought by Orphism into 
Greek religion. Spiritualization of the old Dionysiac doctrine of divine 
possession. Contrast with the anthropomorphism of Homer and Pindar. 
Consecration the keynote of Orphic religion, pp. 454 — 477. 



CHAPTER X. 

Orphic and Dionysiac Mysteries. 

Our chief source a fragment of the Cretans of Euripides. The Ida&xn 
Zeus the same as Zagreus. The Omophagia or feast of raw flesh. The bull- 
victim. Bull-worship in Crete. The Minotaur. Evidence of Clement of 
Alexandria as to the Omophagia. Narrative of Finuicus Maternus. Analo- 
gous Omophagia among primitive Arabs. Account of Niliis. Sacramental 
union with the god by eating his flesh. Reminiscences of human sacrifice in 
Greek tradition. The Titans and the infant Zagreus. The Titans white- 
e^crth men. The smearing with gypsum. The Orphic doctrine of the dis- 
membered god. The Mountain Motlier. Iler image on a Cretan seal 
impression. The Kouretes her attendants. The final consecration of the 
mystic. Meaningof the word oo-to^f t's, 'consecrated.' Orphic taboo.s. Orphic 
formalism. Parody of Orjjhic rites of initiation in the Clouds of Aristophanes. 
The 'shady side' of Orphism. The Liknophoria. Dionysos Liknitos. 
Symliolism of the liknon. Purification, rebirth. The W'ho^i and the Homeric 
[dyo'n. The liknon in marriage ceremonies. The Sacred Marriage. Orphic 
elements in Eleusinian Ritual. lacchos at Eleusis. The Liknophoria iit 
Eleusis. The Sacred MaiTiage and the Sacred Birth at Eleusis. Tiicssalian 
influence, Brimo. Thracian influence, Eumolpos. Dionysos at Eleusis. As 
child, and as grown man. The pantomime element in the cult of Dioiiysos. 
Its influence on the Eleusinian Mysteries, pp. 478— 57L 



xxii Table of Contents 



CHAPTER XI. 

Orphic Eschatology. 

The tablets our chief source for Orphic doctrines. Their provenance and 
general character. The Petelia tablet of the British Museum. Analogous 
tablets from Crete. The Well of Mnemosyne. Parallels in Fiji and Egypt. 
Lethe in Greek Literature. Lethe in the ritual of Trophonios. The river of 
Eunoe, Good Consciousness, in Dante. The Sybaris tablets. The tablet of 
Caecilia Secundina. The confession of Ritual Acts on the Sybaris tablets. 
The attainment of divinity through purification. The escape from the Wheel. 
The kid and the milk. The formulary of adoption. Eschatology on Orphic 
vases from Lower Italy. Orpheus in Hades. The tortured criminals. De- 
velopment by Orphism of doctrine of eternal punishment. The Danaides and 
the Uninitiated, pp. 572—623. 



CHAPTER XII. 

Orphic Cosmogony. 

Orphic theology as seen in the Hymns. The World-Egg. Use of Eggs in 
Orphic ritual of purification. Birth of Eros from World-Egg. Complex 
origin of Orphic Eros. Eros as Herm. Eros as Ker of life. Evidence of 
art. Eros as Ephebos. Eros and the Earth-Mother. Eros present at the 
Anodos. Evidence of art. The Mystery-cult at Phlya, the birthplace of 
Euripides. Pythagorean revival of the cult of the Mother. The mystic Eros 
as Phanes and Protogonos. Contaminatio of Eros and Dionysos. Popular 
Oqjhism on vases from Thebes. Eros as Proteurhythmos. The diviiiities of 
Orphism are demons rather than gods. Orphism resumed, pp. 624 — 658. 

Critical Appendix on the Orphic Tablets . pp. 659 — 673 

Index of Classical Passages .... pp. 674 — 676 
Index 

I. Greek pp. 677, 678 

II. General pp. 678—682 



CHAPTER I. 

OLYMPIAN AND CHTHONIC RITUAL. 

'AAIMOCI MeiAl)(l'oiCIN iAACM^TA K(\i MAKApeCCIN 

oypANioic' 

In characterizing the genius of the Greeks Mr Ruskin says : 
'there is no dread in their Jiearts; pensiveness, amazement, often 
deepest grief and desolation, but terror never. Everlasting calm in 
the presence of all Fate, and joy such as tliey migJit tuin, not indeed 
from perfect beauty, but from beauty at perfect rest! The lovely 
words are spoken of course mainly with reference to art, but they 
are meant also to characterize the Greek in his attitude towards 
the invisible, in his religion — meant to show that the Greek, the 
favoured child of fortune yet ever unspoilt, was exempt from the 
discipline to which the rest of mankind has been subject, never 
needed to learn the lesson that in the Fear of the Lord is the 
beginning of Wisdom. 

At first sight it seems as though the statement were broadly 
true. Greek writers of the fifth century B.C. have a way of speak- 
ing of, an attitude towards, religion, as though it were wholly 
a thing of joyful confidence, a friendly fellowship with the gods, 
whose service is but a high festival for man. In Homer sacrifice is 
hut, as it were, the signal for a banquet of abundant roast flesh 
and sweet wine ; we hear nothing of fasting, of cleansing, and 
atonement. This we might perhaps explain as part of the general 
splendid unreality of the heroic saga, but sober historians of 
the fifth century B.C. express the .same .spirit. Thucydides is 
a.ssuredly by nature no reveller, yet religion is to hiui in the main 
*a rest from toil' He makes Pericles say': 'Moreover we have 

' Thuc. II. :^H, and in the .same spirit Plato {f^i'fj;/. <»;■>;{ n) writes deol Se oiKTti- 
pavm rb twv avdpi'omjiv iTritrovov irecfiVKos y^vos dfairavXas re avroh ruv ir6vo)v ird^avro 
Tai tQiv (OfjTwv ufj.oilias rois Onois. 

'> 11. 1 



2 Olynqnaii and Chthonic Ritual [CH. 

provided for our spirit very many opportunities of recreation, by 
the celebration of games and sacrifices throughout the year.' 

Much the same external, quasi-political, and always cheerful 
attitude towards religion is taken by the ' Old Oligarch i.' He is of 
course thoroughly orthodox and even pious, yet to him the main 
gist of religion appears to be a decorous social enjoyment. In easy 
aristocratic fashion he rejoices that religious ceremonials exist to 
provide for the less well-to-do citizens suitable amusements that 
they would otherwise lack. 'As to sacrifices and sanctuaries and 
festivals and precincts, the People, knowing that it is impossible for 
each poor man individually to sacrifice and feast and have sanctu- 
aries and a beautiful and ample city, has discovered by what means 
he may enjoy these privileges. The whole state accordingly at 
the common cost sacrifices many victims, while it is the People 
who feast on them and divide them among themselves by lot'; 
and again^ as part of the splendour of Athens, he notes that 
'she celebrates twice as many religious holidays as any other city.' 
The very language used by this typical Athenian gentleman 
speaks for itself Burnt-sacrifice {Ovaia), feasting, agonistic games, 
stately temples are to him the essence of religion; the word sacri- 
fice brings to his mind not renunciation but a social banquet ; the 
temple is not to him so much the awful dwelling-place of a 
divinity as an integral part of a 'beautiful and ample city.' 

Thucydides and Xenophon need and attempt no searching 
analysis of religion. Socrates of course sought a definition, a 
definition that left him himself sad and dissatisfied, but that 
adequately embodied popular sentiment and is of importance for 
our enquiry. The end of the Euthyphron is the most disappointing 
thing in Plato; Socrates extracts from Euthyphron what he thinks 
religion is; what Socrates thought he cannot or will not tell^ 

Socrates in his enquiry uses not one abstract term for religion 
— the Greeks have in fact no one word that covers the whole 
field — he uses two*, piety (to ei)cre/3e<?) and holiness (to oacop). 

1 Ps.-Xen. Rep. Athen. ii. 99. - Ps.-Xen. Rep. Athen. iii. 8. 

^ Plat. Euthyph. 15 d. 

* So far as it is possible to distinguish the two, to evae^es is religion from man's 
side, his attitude towards the gods, rb oatov religion from the gods' side, the claim 
they make on man. rb cktiou is the field of what is made over, consecrated to the 
gods. The further connotations of the word as employed by Orphism will be 
discussed later. 'Holiness' is perhaps the nearest equivalent to to octlov in the 
Euthyphron. 



i] Socrates on Religion 3 

Euthyphron of course begins with cheerful confidence : he and all 
other respectable men know quite well what piety and holiness 
are. He willingly admits that 'holiness is a part of justice,' 
that part of justice that appertains to the gods; it is giving 
the gods their due. He also allows, not quite seeing to what 
the argument is tending, that piety and holiness are 'a sort of tend- 
ance {depaireia) of the gods.' This 'tendance,' Socrates presses on, 
'must be of the nature of service or ministration,' and Euthyphron 
adds that it is the sort of service that servants show their masters. 
Socrates wants to know in what particular work and operation the 
gods need help and ministration. Euthyphron answers with some 
impatience that, to put it plainly and cut the matter short, holiness 
consists in 'a man understanding how to do what is pleasing to 
the gods in word and deed, i.e. by prayer and sacrifice.' Socrates 
eagerly seizes his advantage and asks : ' You mean then that 
holiness is a sort of art of praying and sacrificing ? ' ' Further,' 
he adds, ' sacrifice is giving to the gods, prayer is asking of them, 
holiness then is a art of asking and giving.' If we give to the 
gods they must want something of us, they must want to ' do 
business with us.' ' Holiness is then an art in which gods and men 
do business with each other.' So Socrates triumphantly con- 
cludes, to the manifest discomfort of Euthyphron, who however can 
urge no tenable objection. He feels as a pious man that the 
essence of the service or tendance he owes to the gods is of the 
nature of a freewill tribute of honour, but he cannot deny that the 
gods demand this as a qaid pro quo. 

Socrates, obviously unfair though he is, puts his finger on the 
weak spot of Greek religion as orthodoxly conceived in the fifth 
century B.C. Its formula is do ut des. It is, as Socrates says, a 
'business transaction' and one in which, because god is greater 
than man, man gets on the whole the best of it. The argument of 
the EatJnjphron is of importance to us because it clearly defines 
one, and a prominent, factor in Greek religion, that of service 
(depaTrela) ; and in this service, this kindly ' tendance,' there is no 
elemoiit oi' fear. If man does his part in the friendly transaction, 
the gods will do theirs. None of the deeper problems of what we 
moderns call religion are even touched: there is no ipiestion 
of sin, repentance, sacrificial atonement, purification, no fear of 
judgment to come, no longing after a futiu'e complete beatitude. 

1—2 



4 Ohjinpian and Chthonic Ritual [ch. 

Man offers what seems to him in his ignorance a reasonable 
service to gods conceived of as human and rational. There is no 
trace of scepticism ; the gods certainly exist, otherwise as Sextus 
Empiricusi quaintly argues 'you could not serve them': and they 
have human natures. ' You do not serve Hippocentauri, because 
Hippocentauri are non-existent.' 

To the average orthodox Greek the word depaireia, service, 
tendance, covered a large, perhaps the largest, area of his conception 
of religioD. It was a word expressing, not indeed in the Christian 
sense a religion whose mainspring was love, but at least a religion 
based on a rational and quite cheerful mutual confidence. The 
Greeks have however another word expressive of religion, which 
embodies a quite other attitude of mind, the word SeiaiBaL/j,ovia, 
fear of spirits ; fear, not tendance, fear not of gods but of spirit- 
things, or, to put it abstractly, of the supernatural. 

It is certainly characteristic of the Greek mind that the word 
BeiaiBaL/xovia and its cognates early began to be used in a bad 
sense, and this to some extent bears out Mr Ruskin's assertion. 
By the time of Theophrastos 6 BeKTiSaL/xav is frankly in our sense 
' the superstitious man,' and superstition Theophrastos defines as 
not just and proper reverence but simply 'cowardice in regard 
to the supernatural' Professor Jebb- has pointed out that already 
in Aristotle the word Beia-iBaifMcov has about it a suspicion of its 
weaker side. An absolute ruler, Aristotle^^ says, will be the more 
powerful ' if his subjects believe that he fears the spiritual beings ' 
(iav Seia-iSaifMova vofil^wcnv elvau) but he adds significantly ' he 
must show himself such without fatuity' (avev d^e\repia<;). 

Plutarch has left us an instructive treatise on ' the fear of the 
supernatural.' He saw in this fear, this superstition, the great 
element of danger and weakness in the religion that he loved so 
w^ell. His intellect steeped in Platonism revolted from its un- 
meaning folly, and his gentle gracious temperament shrank from 
its cruelty. He sees^ in superstition not only an error, a wrong 
judgment of the mind, but that worse thing a ' wrong judgment 
inflamed by passion.' Atheism is a cold error, a mere dislocation 
of the mind : superstition is a ' dislocation complicated, inflamed, 

^ Sext. Empir. adv. Math. ix. 123. 

- 'I'he Clmracters of Theophrastug, p. 264. 

" Arist. Polit. p. 1315 a 1. * Plut. de Superstit. i. 



i] Plutarch on Siqjerstition 5 

by a bruise.' ' Atheism is an apathy towards the divine which 
fails to perceive the good : superstition is an excess of passion 
which suspects the good to be evil ; the superstitious are afraid of 
the gods yet fly to them for refuge, flatter and yet revile them, 
invoke them and yet heap blame upon them.' 

Superstition grieved Plutarch in two ways. He saw that it 
terrified men and made them miserable, and he wanted all men 
to be as cheerful and kindly as himself; it also made men think 
evil of the gods, fear them as harsh and cruel. He knew that the 
canonical religion of the poets was an adequate basis for super- 
stitious fear, but he had made for himself a way out of the 
difficulty, a way he explains in his treatise on ' How the poets 
ought to be taken.' ' If Ares be evil spoken of we must imagine it 
to be said of War, if Hephaistos of Fire, if Zeus of Fate, but if 
anything honourable it is said of the real gods'.' Plutarch was too 
gentle to say sharply and frankly : 

' If gods do aught that's shameful, they are no gods-,' 

but he shifted the element of evil, of fear and hate, from his 
theological ideals to the natural and purely human phenomena 
from which they had emerged. He wants to treat the gods and 
regard them as he himself would be treated and regarded, as 
kindly civilized men. ' What!' he says^ 'is he who thinks there are 
no gods an impious man, while he who describes them as the 
superstitious man does, does he not hold views much more impious? 
Well anyhow I for my part would rather people would say of me 
there never was or is any such a man as Plutarch, than that they 
should say Plutarch is an unstable, changeable fellow, irritable, 
vindictive, and touchy about trifles ; if you invite friends to 
dinner and leave out Plutarch, or if you are busy and omit to call 
on him, or if you do not stop to speak to him, he will fasten on 
you and bite you, or he will catch your child and beat him, or turn 
his beast loose into your crops and spoil your harvest.' 

But though he is concerned for the reputation of the gods, his 
€hief care and pity are for man. Atheism shuts out a man, he says, 
from the pleasant things of life. 'These most pleasant things,' 
he adds* in characteristic fashion, 'are festivals and feastings in 

' Pkit. dc ami. poet. 4. ^ Kur. frg. 292. 

■* Plut. de Superntit. x. ■• I'lut. dc Supcmlit. ix. 



6 Olymjnau and Chthonic Ritual [ch. 

connection with sacred things, and initiations and orgiastic festi- 
vals, and invocations and adorations of the gods. At these most 
pleasant things the atheist can but laugh his sardonic laugh, but 
the superstitious man would fain rejoice and cannot, his soul is 
like the city of Thebes : 

" It brims with incense and burnt sacrifice 
And brims with paeans and with lamentations." 

A garland is on his head and pallor on his face, he offers 
sacrifice and is afraid, he prays and yet his tongue falters, he offers 
incense and his hand trembles, he turns the saying of Pythagoras 
into foolishness : " Then we become best when we approach the 
gods, for those who fear spirits when they approach the shrines 
and dwellings of the gods make as though they came to the dens 
of bears and the holes of snakes and the lairs of sea-monsters." ' In 
his protest against the religion of fear Plutarch rises to a real 
eloquence \ ' He that dreads the gods dreads all things, earth and 
sea, air and heaven, darkness and light, a voice, a silence, a dream. 
Slaves forget their masters in sleep, sleep looses their fetters, 
salves their gangrened sores, but for the superstitious man his 
reason is always adreaming but his fear always awake.' 

Plutarch is by temperament, and perhaps also by the decadent 
time in which he lived, unable to see the good side of the religion 
of fear, unable to realize that in it was implicit a real truth, the 
consciousness that all is not well with the world, that there is 
such a thing as evil. Tinged with Orphism as he was, he took it 
by its gentle side and never realized that it was this religion of 
fear, of consciousness of evil and sin and the need of purification, 
of which Orphism took hold and which it transformed to new 
issues. The cheerful religion of ' tendance ' had in it no seeds of 
spiritual development; by Plutarch's time, though he failed to see 
this, it had done its work for civilization. 

Still less could Plutarch realize that what in his mind was a 
degradation, superstition in our sense, had been to his predecessors 
a vital reality, the real gist of their only possible religion. He 
deprecates the attitude of the superstitious man who enters the 
presence of his gods as though he were approaching the hole of a 
snake, and forgets that the hole of a snake had been to his ancestors, 

1 Plut. de Stiperstit. iii. 



i] Plutarcli on Saperstition 7 

and indeed was still to many of his contemporaries, literally 
and actually the sanctuary of a god. He has explained and 
mysticized away all the primitive realities of his own beloved 
religion. It can, I think, be shown that what Plutarch regards 
as superstition was in the sixth and even the fifth century before 
the Christian era the real religion of the main bulk of the 
people, a religion not of cheerful tendance but of fear and de- 
precation. The formula of that religion was not do at des 'I give 
that you may give,' but do ut abeas ' I give that you may go, and 
keep away.' The beings worshipped were not rational, human, 
law-abiding gods, but vague, irrational, mainly malevolent Ba!,fiove'i, 
spirit-things, ghosts and bogeys and the like, not yet formulated 
and enclosed into god-head. The word SeicriSai/jiovia tells its 
own tale, but the thing itself was born long before it was baptized. 

Arguments drawn from the use of the word BeicriSatfMovIa by 
particular authors are of necessity vague and somewhat unsatis- 
factory ; the use of the word depends much on the attitude of 
mind of the writer. Xenophon' for example uses BetaiSai/jLovia in 
a good sense, as of a bracing confidence rather than a degi-ading 
fear. ' The more men are god-fearing, spirit- fearing {8€Lai8aifiove<i), 
the less do they fear man.' It would be impossible to deduce from 
such a statement anything as to the existence of a lower and 
more 'fearful' stratum of religion. 

Fortunately however we have evidence, drawn not from the 
terminology of religion, but from the certain facts of ritual, 
evidence which shows beyond the possibility of doubt that the 
Greeks of the classical period recognised two different classes of 
rites, one of the nature of 'service' addressed to the Olympians, 
the other of the nature of ' riddance ' or ' aversion ' addressed to an 
order of beings wholly alien. It is this second class of rites which 
haunts the mind of Plutarch in his protest against the 'fear of 
spirits' ; it is to this second class of rites that the ' Superstitious 
Man' of Theophrastos was unduly addicted; and this second class of 
rites, which we are apt to regard as merely decadent, superstitious, 
and as such unworthy of more than a pa.ssing notice and condenniM- 
tion, is primitive and lies at the very root and base of Greek 
religion. 

' Xen. Ctjropard. iii. 3. r>H. 



8 Olympimi and Chthonlc Ritual [ch. 

First it must clearly be established that the Greeks themselves 
recognised two diverse elements in the ritual of their state. The 
evidence of the orator Isocrates^ on this point is indefeasible. He 
is extolling the mildness and humanity of the Greeks. In this 
respect they are, he points out, ' like the better sort of gods.' 
'Some of the gods are mild and humane, others harsh and un- 
pleasant.' He then goes on to make a significant statement : 
' Those of the gods who are the source to us of good things have the 
title of Olympians, those whose department is that of calamities 
and punishments have harsher titles ; to the first class both private 
persons and states erect altars and temples, the second is not 
worshipped either with prayers or burnt-sacrifices, but in their case 
we perform ceremonies of riddance' Had Isocrates commented 
merely on the titles of the gods, we might fairly have said that 
these titles only represent diverse aspects of the same divinities, 
that Zeus who is Maimaktes, the Raging One, is also Meilichios, 
Easy-to-be-entreated, a god of vengeance and a god of love. But 
happily Isocrates is more explicit ; he states that the two classes 
of gods have not only diverse natures but definitely diferent rituals, 
and that these rituals not only vary for the individual but are also 
different by the definite prescription of the state. The ritual of 
the gods called Olympian is of burnt-sacrifice and prayer, it is 
conducted in temples and on altars: the ritual of the other class 
has neither burnt-sacrifice nor prayer nor, it would seem, temple or 
altar, but consists in ceremonies apparently familiar to the Greek 
under the name of diroTrofi-Trai, 'sendings away.' 

For a.Tro'TrofMTrai. the English language has no convenient word. 
Our religion still countenances the fear of the supernatural, but we 
have outgrown the stage in which we perform definite ceremonies 
to rid ourselves of the gods. Our nearest equivalent to dnToiroix'Tral 
is 'exorcisms,' but as the word has connotations of magic and 
degraded superstition I prefer to use the somewhat awkward term 
'ceremonies of riddance.' 

Plato more than once refers to these ceremonies of riddance. 
In the Laws' he bids the citizen, if some prompting intolerably 

1 Isocr. Or. v. 117. 

- Plat. Legtj. 854 b Wl iirl ras d7ro5to7ro/i7r^cr6is, Wi iirl deOiv airoTpowaiuv if pa 
'iKiTTjs . . .Tas 5^ rdv KaKuiv ^vvovixlas (pevye dyueTacrrpeTrrt. 



i] Ritual of Aversion 9 

base occur to his mind, as e.g. the desire to commit sacrilege, 
' betake yourself to ceremonies of riddance, go as suppliant to the 
shrines of the gods of aversion, fly from the company of wicked 
men without turning back.' The reference to a peculiar set of 
rites presided over by special gods is clear. These gods were 
variously called aTrorpoTraiot and dTroirofMiraloi, the gods of Aver- 
sion and of Sending-away. 

Harpocration* tells us that Apollodorus devoted the sixth book 
of his treatise Concerning the gods to the discussion of the deol 
anoTrofjLTraloi, the gods of Sending-away. The loss of this treatise 
is a grave one for the history of ritual, but scattered notices enable 
us to see in broad outline what the character of these gods of 
Aversion was. Pausanias- at Titane saw an altar, and in front of 
it a barrow erected to the hero Epopeus, and ' near to the tomb,' 
he says, 'are the gods of Aversion, beside whom are performed the 
ceremonies which the Greeks observe for the averting of evils.' 
Here it is at least probable, though from the vagueness of the 
statement of Pausanias not certain, that the ceremonies were of an 
underworld character such as it will be seen were performed at 
the graves of heroes. The gods of Aversion by the time of 
Pausanias, and probabl}' long before, were regarded as gods who 
presided over the aversion of evil ; there is little doubt that to 
begin with these gods were the very evil men sought to avert. The 
domain of the spirits of the underworld was confined to things 
evil. Babrius^ tells us that in the courtyard of a pious man there 
was a precinct of a hero, and the pious man was wont to sacrifice 
and ))our libations to the hero, and pray to him for a return for his 
hospitality. But the ghost of the dead hero knew better; only the 
regular Olympians are the givers of good, his province as a hero 
was limited to evil only. He appeareil in the middle of the night 
and expounded to the pious man this truly Olympian theology: 

' Good Sir, no hero may give aught of good ; 
For t/iat pray to the gods. We are the givers 
Of all things evil that exist for men.' 

It will be seen, when we come to the subject of hero-worship, that 
this is a very one-sided view of the activity of heroes. Still 
it remains, broadly speaking, true that dead men and the powers 
of the underworld were the objects of fear rather than love, their 
cult was of ' aversion ' rather than ' tendance.' 

' Harpocmt. 8. v. dn-oTro/uTds. •■' P. ii. 11. 1. ^ Babr. Fnh. «H. 



10 Olympian and Chthonic Ritual [ch. 

A like distinction is drawn by Hippocrates ^ between the 
attributes, spheres, and ritual of Olympian and chthonic divinities. 
He says: 'we ought to pray to the gods, for good things to Helios, 
to Zeus Ouranios, to Zeus Ktesias, to Athene Ktesia, to Hermes, to 
Apollo; but in the case of things that are the reverse we must pray 
to Earth and the heroes, that all hostile things may be averted.' 

It is clear then that Greek religion contained two diverse, even 
opposite, factors: on the one hand the element of service {depaireia), 
on the other the element of aversion^ {aTrorpoirt]). The rites of 
service were coonected by ancient tradition with the Olympians, or as 
they are sometimes called the Ouranians: the rites of aversion with 
ghosts, heroes, underworld divinities. The rites of service were of 
a cheerful and rational character, the rites of aversion gloomy 
and tending to superstition. The particular characteristics of 
each set of rites will be discussed more in detail later; for the 
present it is sufficient to have established the fact that Greek 
religion for all its superficial serenity had within it and beneath it 
elements of a darker and deeper significance. 

So far we have been content with the general statements of 
Greek writers as to the nature of their national religion, and the 
evidence of these writers has been remarkably clear. But, in 
order to form any really just estimate, it is necessary to examine in 
detail the actual ritual of some at least of the national festivals. 
To such an examination the next three chapters will be devoted. 

The main result of such an examination, a result which for 
clearness' sake may be stated at the outset, is surprising. We shall 
find a series of festivals which are nominally connected with, or as 
the handbooks say, 'celebrated in honour of various Olympians; 
the Diasia in honour of Zeus, the Thargelia of Apollo and 
Artemis, the Anthesteria of Dionysos. The service of these 
Olympians we should expect to be of the nature of joyous 
' tendance.' To our surprise, when the actual rites are examined, 

^ Hippocr. Trepi evvrrvLuv 639, iirl de tocctiv ivavrioLaw Kal 777 /cat ripwcnv awoTpbiraia 
yev^crOai to. xaXeTrd Travra. 

~ English has no convenient equivalent for aTroTpoTrrj, which may mean 
either turning ourselves away from the thing or turning the thing away from us. 
Aversion, which for lack of a better word I have been obliged to adopt, has too 
much personal aud no ritual connotation. Exorcism is nearer, but too limited and 
explicit. Dr Oldenberg in apparent unconsciousness of depaweia and diroTpowrj uses 
in conjunction the two words Cultus and Abwehr. To his book, Die Religion des 
Veda, though he hardly touches on Grreek matters, I owe much. 



i] Ritual of OJjfmpkuis 11 

we shall find that they have little or nothing to do with the 
particular Olympian to whom they are supposed to be addressed ; 
that they are not in the main rites of burnt-sacrifice, of joy and 
feasting and agonistic contests, but rites of a gloomy underworld 
character, connected mainly with purification and the worship of 
ghosts. The conclusion is almost forced upon us that we have here a 
theological stratification, that the rites of the Olympians have been 
superimposed on another order of worship. The constrast between 
the two classes of rites is so marked, so sharp, that the unbroken 
development from one to the other is felt to be almost impossible. 

To make this clear, before we examine a series of festivals in 
regular calendar order, one typical case will be taken, the Diasia, 
the supposed festival of Zeus ; and to make the argument in- 
telligible, before the Diasia is examined, a word must be said as to 
the regular ritual of this particular Olympian. The ritual of the 
several Olympian deities does not vary in essentials ; an instance 
of sacrifice to Zeus is selected because we are about to examine 
the Diasia, a festival of Zeus, and thereby uniformity is secured. 

Agamemnon', beguiled by Zeus in a dream, is about to go forth 
to battle. Zeus intends to play him false, but all the same he 
accepts the sacrifice. It is a clear instance of do ut des. 

The first act is of prayer and the scattering of barley grains ; 

the victim, a bull, is present but not yet slain : 

'They gathered round the bull and straight the barley grain did take, 
And 'mid them Agamemnon stood and jirayed, and thus he spake : 
O Zeus most great, most glorious, Tliou who dwellest in the sky 
And storm-black cloud, oh grant the dark of evening come not uigh 
At sunset ere I blast t.he house of Priam to black ash, 
And Viurn his doorways with tiei'ce tire, and with my sword-blade gash 
His doublet upon Hector's breast, his conn-ades many a one 
Grant that they bite the dust of earth ere yet the day be done.' 

Next follows the slaying and elaborate carving of the bull for 

the banquet of gods and men : 

'When they had scattered barley grain and thus their prayer had made, 
The bull's head btickward drew they, and slew him, antl they Hayed 
His body and cut slices from the thighs, and these in fat 
They wrai)ped and made a double fold, and gobbets raw tlHTcat 
They laid and these they burnt straightway with Icatiess l)illcts dry 
And held the spitted vitals Hcphaistos' Hame anigh — 
The thighs they biu-nt ; the spitted vitiils next they tjistc, uik.h 
The rest they slice and hcedfully they roast till all is done - 
When they had re.sted from their task ami all the bantpK^t tlight, 
They feasted, in their hearts no stint of feasting and delight.' 

' Horn. //. n. 421. 



12 Olympian and Clithonic Ritual [ch. 

Dr Leafi observes on the passage: 'The significance of the 
various acts of the sacrifice evidently refers to a supposed invitation 
to the gods to take part in a banquet. Barley meal is scattered 
on the victim's head that the gods may share in the fruits of the 
earth as well as in the meat. Slices from the thigh as the best 
part are wrapped in fat to make them burn and thus ascend in 
sweet savour to heaven. The sacrificers after roasting the vitals 
taste them as a symbolical sign that they are actually eating with 
the gods. When this religious act has been done, the rest of the 
victim is consumed as a merely human meal.' 

Nothing could be simpler, clearer. There is no mystic com- 
munion, no eating of the body of the god incarnate in the victim, 
no awful taboo upon what has been offered to, made over to, the gods, 
no holocaust. Homer knows of victims slain to revive b}^ their 
blood the ghosts of those below, knows of victims on which oaths 
have been taken and which are utterly consumed and abolished, but 
the normal service of the Olympians is a meal shared. The gods 
are as Plato- would say 'fellow guests' with man. The god is 
Ouranios, so his share is burnt, and the object of the burning is 
manifestly sublimation not destruction. 

With the burnt-sacrifice and the joyous banquet in our minds 
we turn to the supposed festival of Zeus at Athens and mark the 
contrast, a contrast it will be seen so great that it compels us to 
suppose that the ritual of the festival of the Diasia had primarily 
nothing whatever to do with the worship of Olympian Zeus. 

The Diasia. 

Our investigation begins with a festival which at first sight 
seems of all others for our purpose most unpromising, the Diasia ^ 
Pollux, in his chapter^ on 'Festivals which take their names from 
the divinities worshipped,' cites the Diasia as an instance — 'the 

1 Companion to the Iliad, p. 77. I have advisedly translated oi/Xoxi""a' 1>.V barley 
qrain, not meal, because I believe the ov\oxvTai to be a primitive survival of the 
custom of ollering actual grain, but this disputed question is here irrelevant. 
I follow Dr H. von Fritze, Hermes xxxii. 1897, p. 236. 

- Legg. 653 ^vvtopTaffrds. 

3 The sources for the Diasia are all collected in the useful and so far as I am 
aware complete work, Oskar Band, Die Attischen Diasien — ein Beitrag znr Grie- 
chischen Heortologie, Wissenschaftliche Beilage zum Programm der Victoriaschule, 
Ostern 1883 (Berlin). Many of the more important sources are easily accessible 
in Mr Farnell's Cults of the Greek States, vol. i. pp. 171, 172. Mr Farnell regards 
Zeus Meilichios as merely a form of the Olympian Zeus, not as a contaminatio 
of two primarily distinct religious conceptions. 

4 On. I. 37. 



i] The Bias la 13 

^louseia are from the Muses, the Hermaia from Hermes, the 
Diasia and Pandia from Zeus (Ai6<i), the Panatheuaia from 
Athene.' What could be clearer? It is true that the modern 
philologist observes what naturally escaped the attention of 
Pollux, i.e. that the i in Diasia is long, that in Atd? short, but 
what is the quantity of a vowel as against the accredited worship 
of an Olympian ? 

To the question of derivation it will be necessary to return 
later, the nature of the cult must first be examined. Again at the 
outset facts seem against us. It must frankly be owned that as 
early as the middle of the seventh century B.C. in common as well 
as professional parlance, the Diasia was a festival of Zeus, of 
Zeus with the title Meilichios. 

Our first notice of the Diasia comes to us in a bit of religious 
history as amusing as it is instructive, the story of the unworthy 
trick played by the Delphic oracle on Cylon. Thucydides' tells 
how Cylon took counsel of the oracle how he might seize the 
Acropolis, aud the priestess made answer that he should attempt 
it ' on the greatest festival of Zen^J Cylon never doubted that 
'the greatest festival of Zeus' was the Olympian festival, and 
having been (B.C. 640) an Olympian victor himself, he felt that 
there was about the oracle ' a certain appropriateness.' But in 
fine oracular fashion the god had laid a trap for the unwary 
egotist, intending all the while not the Olympian festival but the 
Attic Diasia, ' for,' Thucydides explains, ' the Athenians too have 
what is called the Diasia, the greatest festival of Zeus, of Zeus 
Meilichios.' The passage is of paramount importance because it 
shows clearly that the obscurity lay in the intentional omission by 
the priestess of the cultus epithet Meilichios, and in that epithet 
as will be presently seen lies the whole significance of the cult. 
Had Zeus Meilichios been named no normal Athenian would have 
blundered. 

Thucydides goes on to note some particulars of the ritual 
of the Diasia; the ceremonies took place outside the citadel, 
sacrifices were offered by the whole people collectively, and many 

' Thucyd. i. 12() ^(ttl yai) /cat 'A6'7;i'atots Atdcria a KaXflrai Ai(k (opTTj MfiXixiov 
fxeylcTTri, l^uj rrjs TroXews eV rj navOr}ix(i Ouovui noWa. oux iepua dX\ -^d,7«'o> Ovfiara 
tTrixi^fia-. 

Schol. iid luc. Uu/jLUTa- riva v^fx/xaTa th SV'^" IJi-op<p6.s rtrvKUniva. iOvov. 



14 Oli/nqncDi and Chthonic Ritual [ch. 

of those who sacrificed offered not animal sacrifices but offering's 
in accordance with local custom. The word lepeta, the regular ritual 
term for animal sacrifices, is here opposed to Ovfiara eTrtxti^pta, 
local sacrifices. But for the Scholiast the meaning of ' local 
sacrifices' would have remained dubious; he explains, and no doubt 
rightly, that these customary ' local sacrifices ' were cakes made in 
the shape of animals. The principle in sacris sinuilata pro veris 
accipi was and is still of wide application, and as there is nothing 
in it specially characteristic of the Diasia it need not be further 
exemplified. 

Two notices of the Diasia in the Clouds of Aristophanes ^ yield 
nothing. The fact that Strepsiades bought a little cart at the 
Diasia for his boy or even cooked a sausage for his relations is of 
no significance. Wherever any sort of religious ceremony goes on, 
there among primitive peoples a fair will be set up and outlying 
relations will come in and must be fed, nor does it concern us to 
decide whether the cart bought by Strepsiades was a real cart or 
as the Scljoliast suggests a cake-cart. Cakes in everj^ conceivable 
form belong to the common fund of quod semper quod ubique. 
Of capital importance however is the notice of the Scholiast on 
line 408 where the exact date of the Diasia is given. It was 
celebrated on the 8th day of the last decade of the month 
Anthesterion — i.e. about the 14th of March. The Diasia was a 
Spring festival and therein as will be shown later (p. 52) lies its 
true significance. 

From Lucian we learn that by his time the Diasia had fallen 
somewhat into abeyance ; in the Icaro-Menippos Zeus complains 
that his altars are as cold as the syllogisms of Chrysippos. Worn 
out old god as he was, men thought it sufficient if they sacrificed 
every six years at Olympia. 'Why is it,' he asks ruefully, 'that for 
so many years the Athenians have left out the Diasia ? ' It is sig- 
nificant that here again, as in the case of Cylon, the Olympian 
Zeus has tended to efface from men's mind the ritual of him who 
bore the title Meilichios. The Scholiast^ feels that some explana- 
tion of an obsolete festival is desirable, and explains : ' the Diasia, 
a festival at Athens, Avhich they keep with a certain element of 

1 vv. 864 and 408. 

2 Luc. Icaro-Menip. 24 sehol. ad loc. Aiaaia eopri] ' Mriv-qaiv, jjf iweTiXovf fxerd 

TLVOS <TTVyi'6TT]T0S, dvOVTeS (V aX'TTj Ad Met\tx^(f». 



i] Tlie Did si a 15 

chilly gloom (aTvyvoTrj^;), offering sacrifices to Zeus Meilichios.' 
This ' chill}' gloom ' arrests attention at once. What has Zeus 
of the high heaven, of the upper air, to do with 'chill}- gloom,' 
with things abhorrent and abominable ? Styx is the chill cold 
water of death, Hades and the Erinyes are 'chilly ones' (a-Tvyepoi), 
the epithet is utterly aloof from Zeus. The Scholiast implies that 
the ' chilly gloom ' comes in from the sacrifice to Zeus Meilicliios. 
Zeus qua Zeus gives no clue, it remains to examine the title 
Meilichios. 

Xenophon in returning from his Asiatic expedition was hin- 
dered, we are told ^ by lack of funds. He piously consulted a 
religious specialist and was informed that ' Zeus Meilichios ' stood 
in his way and that he must sacrifice to the god as he was wont 
to do at home. Accordingly on the following day Xenophon 
' sacrificed and offered a holocaust of pigs in accordance with 
ancestral custom and the omens were favourable.' 

The regular ancestral ritual to Zeus Meilichios was a holocaust 
of pigs, and the god himself was regarded as a source of wealth, 
a sort of Ploutos. Taken by itself this last point could not be 
pressed, as probably by Xenophon's time men would pray to Zeus 
pure and simple for anything and everything; taken in conjunction 
with the holocaust and the title Meilichios, the fact, it will pre- 
sently be seen, is significant. There is of course nothing to prove 
that Xenophon sacrificed at the time of the Diasia, though this 
is possible ; we are concerned now with the cult of Zeus Meilichios 
in general, not with the particular festival of the Diasia. It may 
be noted that the Scholiast, on the passage of Thucydides already 
discussed, says that the ' animal sacrifices ' at the Diasia were 
wpo^ara, a word usually rendered ' sheep ' ; but if he is basing 
his statement on any earlier authority Trpo^ara may quite well 
have meant pig or any four-legged household animal; the meaning 
of the word was only gradually narrowed down to 'sheep.' 

It may be said once for all that the exact animal sacrificed is 
not of the first importance in determining the nature of the god. 
Pigs came to be associated with Demeter and the uudci-uorld 

' Xen. AiKib. VII. 8. 4 rrj Si varepaiq. 6 'Z(vort>CM> ...idi/tro nal u)\o»fai5r6« x^W^'* ''V 
iraTfjujifi fOfMifj Kal tKaWdpei. The incident pioljiibly took pliice in Fcl)riittry, the 
month of the Diasia. See Mr H. G. Dakynn, Xcii. vol. i. ji. HIT*. 



16 OlyiKplan and CJithonic Ritual [cii. 

divinities, but that is because these divinities belong to a primitive 
stratum, and the pig then as now was cheap to rear and a standby 
to the poor. The animal sacrificed is significant of the status of the 
worshipper rather than of the content of the god. The argument 
from the pig must not be pressed, though undoubtedly the cheap 
pig as a sacrifice to Zeus is exceptional. 

The manner of the sacrifice, not the material, is the real 
clue to the significance of the title Meilichios. Zeus as Meilichios 
demanded a holocaust, a whole burnt-offering. The Zeus of Homer 
demanded and received the tit-bits of the victim, though even these 
in token of friendly communion were shared by the worshippers. 
Such was the custom of the Ouranioi, the Olympians in general. 
Zeus Meilichios will have all or nothing. His sacrifice is not 
a happy common feast, it is a dread renunciation to a dreadful 
power ; hence the atmosphere of ' chilly gloom.' It will later be 
seen that these un-eaten sacrifices are characteristic of angry 
ghosts demanding placation and of a whole class of underworld 
divinities in general, divinities who belong to a stratum of thought 
more primitive than Homer. For the present it is enough to 
mark that the service of Zeus Meilichios is wholly alien to that of 
the Zeus of Homer. The next passage makes still clearer the 
nature of this service. 

Most fortunately for us Pausanias, when at Myonia in Locris, 
visited ^ a sanctuary, not indeed of Zeus Meilichios, but of ' the 
Meilichians ' He saw there no temple, only a grove and an altar, 
and he learnt the nature of the ritual. ' The sacrifices to " the 
Meilichians" are at night-time and it is customary to consume the 
flesh on the spot before the sun is up.' Here is no question of 
Zeus ; we have independent divinities worshipped on their own 
account and with nocturnal ceremonies. The suspicion begins to 
take shape that Zeus must have taken over the worship of these 
dread Meilichian divinities with its nocturnal ceremonial. The 
suspicion is confirmed when we find that Zeus Meilichios is, like 
the Erinyes, the avenger of kindred blood. Pausanias- saw near 
the Kephissos 'an ancient altar of Zeus Meilichios; on it Theseus 
received purification from the descendants of Phytalos after he 
had slain among other robbers Sinis who was related to himself 
through Pittheus.' 

1 P. X. 38. 8. ^ P. I. 37. i. 



i] The Diasia 17 

Again Pausanias' tells us that, after an internecine fray, the 
Argives took measures to purify themselves from the guilt of 
kindred blood, and one measure was that they set up an image of 
Zeus Meilichios. Meilichios, Easy-to-be-entreated, the Gentle, the 
Gracious One, is naturally the divinity of purification, but he is 
also naturally the other euphemistic face of Maimaktes, he who 
rages eager, panting and thirsting for blood. This Hesychius'^ 
tells us in an instructive gloss. Maimaktes-Meilichios is double- 
faced like the Erinyes-Eumenides. Such undoubtedly would have 
been the explanation of the worship of Zeus Meilichios by any 
educated Greek of the fifth century B.C. with his monotheistic 
tendencies. Zeus he would have said is all in all, Zeus Meilichios 
is Zeus in his underworld aspect — Zeus-Hades. 

Pausanias^* saw at Corinth three images of Zeus, all under the 
open sky. One he says had no title, another was called He of 
the underworld (xOovio^), the third The Highest. What earlier 
cults this triple Zeus had absorbed into himself it is impossible 
to say. 

Such a determined monotheism is obviously no primitive con- 
ception, and it is interesting to ask on what facts and fusion of 
facts it was primarily based. Happily where literature and even 
ritual leave us with suspicions only, art compels a clearer definition. 

The two reliefs in figs. 1 and 2 were found at the Peiraeus 
and are now in the Berlin Museum^. From the inscription on 
the relief in fig. 1 and from numerous other inscribed reliefs 
found with it, it is practically certain that at the place in 
which they were found Zeus Meilichios was worshipped. In any 
case the relief in fig. 1 is clearly dedicated to him. Above the 
splendid coiled beast is plainly inscribed ' to Zeus Meilichios ' 

1 P. II. 20. 1. ^ Hesych. s.v. Matyud/crTys- fj-eiXlxtos, KaOdpaios. 

■' P. II. 2. 8. 

'' Permission to republish the two reliefs figured here and that in tiK. 5 
has been courteously granted nie by Professor Kekule von Stradowitz, Director 
of the Berlin Museum, and I owe" to his kindness the e.xceiient pliotoKraplis 
from which the repro<luctionK are made. Prom the ollicial catalogue {ll<scliiYihiiii<i 
der Antiken SkulxHuren in Berlin) I (luotc the following particulars as to material, 
provenance &c. 

1. Cat. 722, H. O-GK, J5r. 0-:Jl. Hymettus marble found with No. 72;i at tin; 
Zca Jjarbour not far from filler's house. Taken to B(,'rlin lH7i). Inscribed _^ 1 1 
,\Ii;i.\IXISM. Date fourtli century ii.c, see CIA. u. 3, 15H1, cf. CIA. n. 3. 1.078, 
1582, 1583. 

2. Cat. 723, material, provenance, date, same as 722. 

H. 2 



18 



Olympian and Chthonic Ritual 



[CH. 





,-«***?■■ 

>-•--- 



(Aa MeikixUo). We are brought face to face with the astounding 
fact that Zeus, father of gods and men, is figured by his wor- 
shippers as a snake. 
So astonishing is 
the inscription that 
M. Foucart\ who 
first discussed these 
reliefs, suggested 
that in Zeus Meili- ; 

chios we have J / 

inerely a Hellenic 
rendering of a Phe- 
nician divinity, Baal 
Melek or Moloch. 
The worship of such 
a divinity would be 
well in place at the 
harbour of Muny- 
chia, and as M. 
Foucart points out, 
the names of the 
dedicators lack the 
demotic. Unfortu- 
nately for this in- 
teresting theory we 
have no evidence 

that ' Moloch ' was Fig. l. 

ever worshipped in 

snake form. Another way out of the difficulty was sought ; the 
snake it was suggested was, not the god himself, but his attribute. 
But this solution does not square with facts. Zeus is one of the 
few Greek gods who never appear attended by a snake. Asklepios, 
Hermes, Apollo, even Demeter and Athene have their snakes, 



^; 





/:i 



1 Bull, de Corr. Hell. vii. p. 507. I regret that in the first edition of my book 
I treated M. Foucart's theory with, I fear, scant ceremony. The possibility of a 
contaminatio between the Phenician Baal and Zeus Meilichios cannot be lightly 
dismissed. For a discussion of the subject see especially Clermont-Ganueau, Le 
dieu Satrape, p. 6-5, on the river Meilichos at Patrae, and Lagrange, Etudes sur les 
Religions Semitiques, p. 105. But until evidence is forthcoming of the snake-form 
of Moloch it is simpler to see in the snake Meilichios an indigenous snake demon 
of the under world. 



I] 



The Diasia 



19 



•*^ 



Zeus never. Moreover when the god developed from snake form 
to human form, as, it will later be shown, was the case with 
Asklepios, tlie snake he once was remains coiled about his staff or 
attendant at his throne. In the case of Zeus Meilichios in human 
form the snake he once ivas not disappears clean and clear. 

The explanation of the snake as merely an attribute is indeed 
impossible to any unbiassed 
critic who looks at the relief 
in fig. 2. Here clearly the 
snake is the object wor- 
shipped by the woman and 
two men who approach with 
gestures of adoration. The 
colossal size of the beast as 
it towers above its human 
adorers is the Magnificat of 
the artist echoed by the wor- 
shippers. When we confront 
the relief in fig. 3, also found 
at the Peiraeus, with those 
in figs. 1 and 2, the secret 
is out at last. In fio-. 3 a 
man followed by a woman 
and childapproachesan altar, 
behind which is seated a 
bearded god holding a scep- 
tre and patera for libation. Fjq 2. 
Above is clearly inscribed 

'Aristarche to Zeus Meilichios' {'Apiarapxv ^^^ MeLXcx^o)). And 
the truth is nothing more or less than this. The huuian-shaped 
Zeus has slipped himself quietly into the place of the old snake- 
god. Art sets plainly forth what has been dimly shadowed in 
ritual and mythology. It is not that Zeus the Olympian has 
' an underworld aspect ' ; it is the cruder fact that he of the iii)per 
air, of the thunder and lightning, extrudes an ancicut serpent- 
demon of the lower world, Meilichio.s. Meilichios is no foreign 
Moloch, he is home-grown, autochtlioiious before the fnniiuhitii)n 
of Zeus. 

2—2 








20 Olympian and Chthonic Ritual [ch. 

How the shift may have been effected art again helps us to 




Fig. 3. 

conjecture. In the same sanctuary at the Peiraeus that yielded the 
reliefs in figs. 1 and 2 was found 
the inscribed reliefs in fig. 4. We 
have a similar bearded snake and 
above is inscribed ' Heracleides to 
the god.' The worshipper is not 
fencing, uncertain whether he 
means Meilichios or Zeus ; he 
brings his offering to the local 
precinct where the god is a snake 
and dedicates it to the god, the 
god of that precinct. It is not 
monotheism, rather it is parochial- 
ism, but it is a conception tending 
towards a later monotheism. 
When and where the snake is 
simply ' the god,' the fusion with 
Zeus is made easy. 

In fig. 5 is figured advisedly a monument of snake worship, 
which it must be distinctly noted comes, not from the precinct 
of Zeus Meilichios at the Peiraeus, but from Eteonos in Boeotia. 
When we come to the discussion of hero-worship, it will be seen 
that all over Greece the dead hero was worshipped in snake form 

1 Bull, de Corr. Hell. 1883, p. 510. 




Fig. 4. 



I] 



The Diasia 



21 



and addressed by euphemistic titles akin to that of Meilichios. 
The relief from Boeotia is a good instance of such worship and is 




iMNMaWMMIHMtajttMMI 



wmmmm 




r 




J 




\ 



Fig. 5. 

chosen because of the striking parallelism of its art type with that 
of the Peiraeus relief in fig. 3. The maker of this class of 
votive reliefs seems to have kept in stock designs of groups of 
pious worshippers which he could modify as required and to 
which the necessary god or snake and the appropriate victim 
could easily be appended. Midway in conception between the 
Olympian Zeus with his sceptre and the snake demon stands 
another reliefs (fig. 6), also from the Peiraeus sanctuary. Meilichios 
is human, a snake no longer, but he is an earth god, he bears the 
cornucopia-, his victim is the pig. He is that Meilichios to whom 
Xenophon offered the holocaust of pigs, praying for wealth ; he 
is also the Zeus-Hades of Euripides. We might have been 
tempted to call him simply Hades or Ploutos but for the inscrip- 
tion [K/3tTo]/36Xj7 Att '^eiki-yiw, ' Kritoboule to Zeus Meilichios,' 
which makes the dedication certain. 

By the light then of these reliefs the duality, the inner 
discrepancy of Zeus Meilichios admits of a simple and straight- 
forward s(jlution. It is the monument of a superposition of cults. 

' From a photograph (Peiraeus 12) publislied by kind permisaion of tho German 
Archaeological Institute, see Kpli. Arch. 1HH(J, p. 47. 

'^ The cornucoi)ia would be a natural Httril)ute for Zeus Ktcsios who Dr Martin 
Nilsson kindly tells me appears in Hiiuke form (inscribed) on a votive relief in tho 
local Museum at Thebes. 



22 Olympian and Chtlionic Ritual [cH. 

But the difficulty of the name of the festival, Diasia, remains. 
There is no reason to suppose that the name was given late ; and, 
if primitive, how can we sever it from Aio? ? 



\=ff0t^ 




Fig. 6. 

It is interesting to note that the ancients themselves were not 
quite at ease in deriving Diasia from /^c6<i. Naturally they were 
not troubled by difficulties as to long and short vowels, but they 
had their misgivings as to the connotation of the word, and they 
try round uneasily for etymologies of quite other significance. 
The Scholiast on Lucian's Timon^ says the word is probably 
derived from Stacralvetv ' to fawn on,' ' to propitiate.' Suidas^ 
says it comes from hta^vyelv avrov<; eu^o.?? ra? a(7a<;, because in 
the Diasia ' men escaped from curses by prayers.' If etymologi- 
cally absurd, certainly, as will be seen, a happy guess. 

Such derivations are of course only worth citing to show that 
even in ancient minds as regards the derivation of Diasia from 
Ato9 misgiving lurked. 

The misgiving is emphasized by the modern philologist. The 
derivation of Diasia with its long from Ato? with its short i is 
scientifically improbable if not impossible. Happily another 
derivation that at least satisfies scientific conditions has been 
suggested by Mr R A. Neil. Not only does it satisfy scientific 
conditions but it also confirms the view arrived at by independent 
1 LuciaD, Twi. c. 7. ^ Suidas s.v. Aidcria. 



i] The Diem Fleece 23 

investigation of the ritual and art representations of Zeus 
Meilichios. Mr Neil ^ suggests that in several Greek words show- 
ing the stem Slo this stem may stand by the regular falling away 
of the medial a for 8lao and is identical with the Latin dvro\ 
dirus, he notes, was originally a purely religious word. Such 
words would be the Diasia, whatever the termination may be, the 
Aia of Teos, and perhaps the UdvSia of Athens. Seen in the 
light of this new etymology the Diasia becomes intelligible : it is 
the festival of curses, imprecations ; it is nocturnal and associated 
with rites of placation and purgation, two notions inextricably 
linked in the minds of the ancients. 

We further understand why Meilichios seems the male double 
of Erinys and why his rites are associated with ' chilly gloom.' 
The Diasia has primarily and necessarily nothing to do with Ato9, 
with Zeus ; it has everything to do with ' dirae,' magical curses, 
exorcisms and the like. The keynote of primitive ritual, it will 
become increasingly clear, is exorcism. 

In the light of this new derivation it is possible further to 
explain another element in the cult of Zeus Meilichios hitherto 
purposely left unnoticed, the famous Ato? kwSiov, the supposed 
'fleece of Zeus.' The Ato? kcoSiov is, I think, no more the fleece 
of Zeus than the Diasia is his festival. 

Polemon, writing at the beginning of the second century B.C., 
undoubtedly accepted the current derivation, and on the statement 
of Polemon most of our notices of ' the fleece of Zeus ' appear to 
be based. Hesychius^ writes thus : ' The fleece of Zeus: they use 
this expression when the victim has been sacrificed to Zeus, and 
those who were being purified stood on it with their left foot. 

1 J. U.S. XIX. p. 114, note 1. 

'■^ Mr P. (Jiles kindly tells me that a rare Sanskrit word dveshas meaning 'bate' 
and the like exists and phonetically would nearly correspond to the Latin dirus. 
The corresponding form in Greek would appear as Seios, iniless in late (ireek. But 
from the end of the fifth century n.c. onwards the pronunciation would be the same 
as oios, and if the word survivtid only in ritual terms it would naturally be confused 
with oios. Almost all authorities on Latin however regard the ;•// in dirus as a suHix 
containing an original /• as in )iiirus, diirus etc. This view, which would be fatal 
to the etymology of dirus pioposed in the text, seems supported by a slateini'iit of 
Servius (if the statement be accurate) on Aen. iii. 235 'Sabini et llnibri (piae nos 
mala dira appellant,' as, though « between vowels passes in Latin and Unibriau 
into r, it remains an x sound in Sabine. 

3 Hesych. s.v. 6 ot iloX^/xwv rb iK tov Ad reOvfi^vov Upelov. From Athenaoufl also 
we learn that Polernon had treated in some detail of the 'fleece of Zeus'; Atiienaeua 
says (xi. p. 478 c), [loX^fjLUv 5' tV T<f wepl rou 5lov KtodLov (j>yi<rl... 



24 Olympian and Clitlionic Ritual [ch. 

Some say it means a great and perfect fleece. But Polemon says 
it is the fleece of the victim sacrificed to Zeus. 

But Polemon is by no means infallible in the matter of 
etymology, though invaluable as reflecting the current impression 
of his day. Our conviction that the Ato? Kcchiov is necessarily 
' the fleece of Zeus ' is somewhat loosened when we find that this 
fleece was by no means confined to the ritual of Zeus, and in so far 
as it was connected with Zeus, was used in the ritual only of a Zeus 
who bore the titles Meilichios and Ktesios. Suidas ^ expressly 
states that ' they sacrifice to Meilichios and to Zeus Ktesios and 
they keep the fleeces of these (victims) and call them " Dian," and 
they use them when they send out the procession in the month of 
Skirophorion, and the Dadouchos at Eleusis uses them, and others 
use them for purifications by strewing them under the feet of those 
who are polluted.' 

It is abundantly clear that Zeus had no monopoly in the fleece 
supposed to be his ; it was a sacred fleece used for purification 
ceremonies in general. He himself had taken over the cult of 
Meilichios, the Placable One, the spirit of purification ; we con- 
jecture that he had also taken over the fleece of purification. 

Final conviction comes from a passage in the commentary of 
Eustathius- on the purification of the house of Odysseus after the 
slaying of the suitors. Odysseus purges his house by two things, 
first after the slaying of the suitors by water, then after the hang- 

1 Suidas s.v. dvovcri re rai re MetXtx'V '^^'■^ '''V RrT/ir/y Ad, to. d^ Kudia tovtup 
<pv\d<T<yovcn Kal Ala {87a) TrpocrayopevovTai., xpcDcrat 5' avrois ot re '^KipocpopMV t7)v 
TTO/xTTTiv <TT^WovT€S Kai 6 dadovxos €V KXevcrifi Kai dWoi tlv^s vpos Kadapixoiis inrotXTOp- 
vvvTes avTO. rots woal tuiv ivayGiv. For A^a Gaisford conjectures Alos but from the 
passage of Eustathius (see infr.) it is clear that we must read dla. 

- Eustatb. ad Od. xxii. 481 § 1934 — 5 iobKow yap oi "EWrjves ovtui to. Toiavra 
/xijar) Kadalpecrdai, 5i.oTroiJ,wov/j,eva. /cat erepoi jxev brfKovffL rpdirovs Kadapcriiov erepovs, a 
Kai e^dyovres tQv olkuv fxera to,^ iOL/uLovs eTraotSas Trpoa^ppnrTov dix(f>68ois ^fnra\ii> to. 
TTpoacoTra aTpe<povTes Kai iwaviovTes dfieracrTpeirTi. 6 de ye ironqriKos ^OSvaaevs ovx ovtoj 
TToiei dXX' €T^pu}s dirXovcTTepov. (prjcri yovv olcre dieiov ypfjv KaKuiv dKOs...TrXeov iroi'qffa% 
ov8ev ...dieiov de 6vfMid/j.aTOS eldos Kadaipeiv Bokovvtos tovs fiLacr/jLOvs. 5i6 Kal diaareiXas 
KaKuv aKos aiird cp-qaiv 6 TroLrjrrjs, oilre 34 rives evravda ewcpdai crvvrjdeis rots TraXatots 
oiJTe arevoiTrds ev cp dvdpaKes dwaybixevoL avruj dyyeiuj ippiirTovro owicrOoepavQs. iariov 
de OTi ov ix6vov did Oeiov eyivovro Kadappiol Kadd TrpocrextDs eypd(pr] dXXd Kal (pvrd riva 
eis TOVTO ;(/3^(ny(ta rjv. dpiffTepeiov yovp, (pVTOv Kara llavcraviav ewLTr]5eLov eis Kadap/jLov 
Kai crvi de eh Toiaura, iariv ov, irapeXafi^dvero, cbs ev IXtdSt (paiverai.. Kal oi to 
dioTTo/jiTreiv d^ epp-rfvevovris (paaiv on diov eKdXovv Kihdiov iepetov rvOevTos Ad p.ei\ixi-V 
iv Toh Kadapfxoh, (pdivovros M.aijj.aKT'qpiQivo'i fxijvoi ore ijyovTo rd wofXTraia, Kai KadapjuQv 
e\'/3oXat eis rds rpiddovs eyivovro. elxov de fierd ^etpas wop.irbv • birep rjv, cpaai, KijpuKiov, 
cijias 'Ep/xoO. Kai iK rod roiovrov ttoixttov Kai row p7)divTos dlov rd dioTro/JLTreiv . . .dWuis 
di KOLvbrepov dioTrofXTrelv Kai dTrodioTrofiTreiv e<palveT0 ro Aios dXe^iKdKov iTnKXrjaei. 
iKir^fXTveiv rd <pavXa. Eustathius passes on to speak of purification by blood and 
the (pap/xaKoi, see p. 95. 



i] The Dian Fleece 25 

ing of the maidens by fire and brimstone. His method of purifying 

is a simple and natural one, it might be adopted to-day in the 

disinfecting of a polluted house. This Eustathius notes, and 

contrasts it with the complex magical apparatus in use among the 

ancients and very possibly still employed by the pagans of his 

own day. He comments as follows : ' The Greeks thought such 

pollutions were purified by being "sent away." Soaie describe one 

sort of purifications some others, and these purifications they carried 

out of houses after the customary incantations and they cast them 

forth in the streets with averted faces and returned without 

looking backwards. But the Odysseus of the poet does not act 

thus, but performs a different and a simpler act, for he says : 

" Bring brimstone, ancient dame, the cure of ills, and bring me fire 
That I the hall may fumigate." ' 

In the confused fashion of his day and of his own mind 
Eustathius sees there is a real distinction but does not recognise 
wherein it lies. He does not see that Homer's purification is actual, 
physical, rational, not magical. He goes on : ' Brimstone is a sort 
of incense which is reputed to cleanse pollutions. Hence the poet 
distinguishes it, calling it " cure of ills." In this passage there are 
none of the incantations usual among the ancients, nor is there 
the small vessel in which the live coals were carried and thrown 
away vessel and all backwards.' 

What half occurs to Eustathius and would strike any in- 
telligent modern observer acquainted with ancient ritual is that 
the purification of the house of Odysseus is as it were scientific ; 
there is none of the apparatus of magical ' riddance.' Dimly and 
darkly he puts a hesitating finger on the cardinal difference 
between the religion of Homer and that of later (and earlier) 
Greece, that Homer is innocent, save for an occasional labelled 
magician, of magic. The Archbishop seems to feel this as something 
of a defect, a shortcoming. He goes on : ' It must be understood 
that purifications were effected not only as has just been described, 
by means of sulphur, but there are also certain plants that were 
useful for this purpose ; at least according to Pausanias there 
is verbena, a plant in use for purification, and the pig was 
sometimes employed for such purposes, as appears in the Iliad.' 
This mention of means of purification in general brings irre- 
sistibly to the mind of Eustathius a salient instance, the very 



26 Olympian and Chthonic Ritual [ch. 

fleece we are discussing. He continues : ' Those who interpret 
the word BcoTro/nTreiv say that they applied the term Blov to the 
fleece of the animal that had been sacrificed to Zeus Meilichios 
in purifications at the end of the month of Maimakterion* when 
they performed the Sendings and when the castings out of 
pollutions at the triple ways took place : and they held in their 
hands a sender which was they say the kerukeion, the attribute of 
Hermes, and from a sender of this sort, pompos, and from the Stov, 
the fleece called "Dian," they get the word StoTro/xTretz^, divine 
sending.' 

From this crude and tentative etymological guessing two im- 
portant points emerge. Eustathius does not speak of the 'fleece 
of Zeus,' but of the Dian or perhaps we may translate divine 
fleece. 8co<i is with him an adjective to be declined, not the genitive 
of Zev^. This loosens somewhat the connection of the fleece with 
Zeus, as the adjective Bio<i could be used of anything divine or even 
magical in its wonder and perfection. Further, and this is of 
supreme importance, he connects the Dian fleece with the difficult 
word StoTTo/ATreiz/, and in this lies the clue to its real interpretation. 
' That this,' he goes on — meaning his derivation of SioTrofnTelv from 
irofxiro'i the kerukeion of Hermes and hlov the divine fleece — ' is so 
we find from special investigation, but in more general parlance 
by SioTTOfiTTeiv and dTroScoTro/xTreiv is meant the sending away of 
unclean things in the name of Zeus Averter of Evil.' Eustathius 
evidently gets nervous ; his ' special investigation ' is leading him 
uncomfortably near the real truth, uncomfortably far from the 
orthodox Zeus, so he pulls himself up instinctively. 

The explanation of the strange word d'rroStoTro/j.'Tretv, to which 
Eustathius at the close of his remarks piously reverts, is still 
accredited by modern lexicons. a7roSi07royu,7reto-^ai— the middle 
form is the more usual— means, we are told, ' to avert threatened 
evils by offerings to Zeusl' Are scholars really prepared to 
believe that dTroSioTro/xTreiaOai means, to put it shortly, ' to Zeus 
things away ' ? The lexicons after this desperate etymology proceed: 
'hence, to conjure away, to reject with abhorrence,' and finally, 
under a heading apart, ' dTroStoTro/xTreladac oIkov, to purify a house.' 
Surely from beginning to end the meaning inherent in the word 

« Maimaktes, it will be remembered, is the other face of Meihchios, see supra. 
2 See Liddell and Scott, s.v. 



i] The Dian Fleece 27 

is simply 'to rid of pollution'; airohLOTro^Trela-Oai is substantially 
the same as diroTri/MTretv, to send away, to get I'id of, but — and 
this is the important point — the element Slo emphasizes the means 
and method of the ' sending.' The quantity of the c in aTroSto- 
irofiTrelc-Oai we have no means of knowing, the i in Diasia the 
feast of Zeus Meilichios is long, the i in the 8tov kcoScov used in 
his service is long, the Slav KcoStov is used in ritual concerned with 
8i07rofi7rov/j,eva, its purpose is aTroSioTro/jLTreladat. Is it too bold 
to see in the mysterious 8lo the same root as has been seen in 
Diasia and to understand dTroSioTro/uLTreiadai as ' to effect riddance 
by magical imprecation or deprecation ' ? 

The word dirus is charged with magic, and this lives on in the 
Greek word 8lo<; which is more magical than divine. It has that 
doubleness, for cursing and for blessing, that haunts all inchoate 
religious terms. The fleece is not divine in our sense, not definitely 
either for blessing or for cursing ; it is taboo, it is ' medicine,' it 
is magical. As magical medicine it had povver to purify, i.e. in 
the ancient sense, not to cleanse physically or purge morally, but 
to rid of evil influences, of ghostly infection. 

Magical fleeces were of use in ceremonies apparently the most 
diverse, but at the bottom of each usage lies the same thought, 
that the skin of the victim has magical efficacy as medicine 
against impurities. Dicaearchus^ tells us that at the rising 
of the dog-star, when the heat was greatest, young men in the 
flower of their age and of the noblest families went to a cave 
called the sanctuary of Zeus Aktaios, and also (very significantly 
it would seem) called the Cheironion ; they were girded about 
with fresh fleeces of triple wool. Dicaearchus says that this was 
because it was so cold on the mountain ; but if so, why must the 
fleeces be fresh ? Zeus Aktaios, it is abundantly clear, has taken 
over the cave of the old Centaur Cheiron ; the magic fleeces, newly 
slain because all ' medicine ' must be fresh, belong to his order as 
they belonged to the order of Meilichios. 

Again we learn that whoever would take counsel of the oracle 
of Ainphiaraos'^ must first purify himself, and Pausanias himself 

' Dicaearch. Frg. If int. u. 202. 

2 P. I. 34. 2—5. Strabo (vi. p. 284) says that the DauniunB when tbcy coiiHultctl 
the oracle of the hero Calohas sacrificed a l>hick ram to him and Hlept on the fleece. 
The worHhipper.s of the ' Syrian GoddeHH,' Lucian Hayn (I)f Sijr. Dea :J5), knelt on the 



28 Ohjmpian and Clitlionic Ritual [ch. 

adds the explanatory words, ' Sacrificing to the god is a ceremony 
of purification.' But the purification ceremony did not, it would 
appear, end with the actual sacrifice, for he explains, ' Having 
sacrificed a ram they spread the skin beneath them and go to 
sleep, awaiting the revelation of a dream ' ; here again, though the 
name is not used, we have a hlov kcoBlov, a magic fleece with 
purifying properties. It is curious to note that Zeus made an 
effort to take over the cult of Amphiaraos, as he had taken that of 
Meilichios ; we hear of a Zeus Amphiaraos', but the attempt was 
not a great success ; probably the local hero Amphiaraos, himself 
all but a god, was too strong for the Olympian. 

The results of our examination of the festival of the Diasia 
are then briefly this. The cult of the Olympian Zeus has over- 
laid the cult of a being called Meilichios, a being who was 
figured as a snake, who was a sort of Ploutos, but who had also 
some of the characteristics of an Erinys ; he was an avenger of 
kindred blood, his sacrifice was a holocaust offered by night, his 
festival a time of 'chilly gloom.' A further element in his cult 
was a magical fleece used in ceremonies of purification and in the 
service of heroes. The cult of Meilichios is unlike that of the 
Olympian Zeus as described in Homer, and the methods of puri- 
fication characteristic of him wholly alien. The name of his 
festival means ' the ceremonies of imprecation.' 

The next step in our investigation will be to take in order 
certain well-known Athenian festivals, and examine the cere- 
monies that actually took place at each. In each case it will be 
found that, though the several festivals are ostensibly consecrated 
to various Olympians, and though there is in each an element 
of prayer and praise and sacrificial feasting such as is familiar to 
us in Homer, yet, when the ritual is closely examined, the main 
part of the ceremonies will be seen to be magical rather than what 
we should term religious. Further, this ritual is addressed, in so 
far as it is addressed to any one, not to the Olympians of the 
upper air, but to snakes and ghosts and underworld beings ; its 

ground and put the feet and the head of the victim on their heads. He probably 
means that they got inside the skin and wore it with the front paws tied round the 
neck as Heracles wears the lion-skin. 
^ Dicaearchus i. 6. 



I] 



The Attic Calendar 



29 



main gist is purification, the riddance of evil influences, this rid- 
dance being naturally prompted not by cheerful confidence but 
bv an ever imminent fear. 

In the pages that follow but little attention will be paid to 
the familiar rites of the Olympians, the burnt-sacrifice and its 
attendant feast, the dance and song ; our Avhole attention will be 
focussed on the rites belonging to the lower stratum. This course 
is adopted for two reasons. First, the rites of sacrifice as described 
by Homer are simple and familiar, needing but little elucidation 
and having already received superabundant commentary, whereas 
the rites of the lower stratum are often obscure and have met 
with little attention. Second, it is these rites of purification 
belonging to the lower stratum, primitive and barbarous, even 
repulsive as they often are, that furnished ultimately the material 
out of which ' mysteries ' were made — mysteries which, as will be 
seen, when informed by the new spirit of the religions of Dionysos 
and Orpheus, lent to Greece its deepest and most enduring 
religious impulse. 

ATTIC CALENDAR. 

Note. Names of Festivals selected for special discussion are printed in 
large type. Names of Festivals incidentally discussed in italics. 

Kronia, Panathenaia 

Metageitnia 

Eleusinia and Greater Mysteries 

Thesmophoria. Pyanepsia and 
Oschophoria [Id. Oct. (Oct. 15) 
October Horse] 

Haloa 

Gamelia (Lenaia?) 

Anthesteria, Diasia, Lesser 

Mysteries [xv-. Kal. Mart. (Feb. 

15) Lupercalia] [(Feb. 21) 

Feralia] 
Dionysia 
Munychia, Brauronia 

Th a Rti E M A, KnUijH teria, Pfi/x teria 
(May 1") Argci, June 15 Vcst- 
alia, Q. St. D. F.) 
Skiropliorid, Arrephoriti, DipD- 
lia, J>()U[ili(>nia 

began in the monlli Jli'c-a- 

tombaiou (July — August) at the summer's height. In it was 



1. 


Hecatombaion 


July, August 


2. 


Metageitnion 


Aug., September 


3. 


Boedromion 


Sept., October 


4. 


Pyanepsion 


Oct., November 


5. 


Mairaakterion 


Nov., December 


6. 


Poseideon 


Dec, January 


7. 


Gamelion 


Jan., February 


8. 


Anthesterion 


Feb., March 


9. 


Elaphebolion 


March, Ajn-il 


10. 


Munychion 


April, May 


11. 


Thargelion 


May, June 


12. 


Skirophorion 


June, July 



The Athenian oflicial calendar 



30 Olym^yian mid Chthonic Ritual [ch. 

celebrated the great festival of the Panathenaia, whose very name 
marks its political import. Such political festivals, however 
magnificent and socially prominent, it is not my purpose to 
examine ; concerning the gist of primitive religious conceptions 
they yield us little. The Panathenaia is sacred rather to a city 
than a goddess. Behind the Panathenaia lay the more elementary 
festival of the Kronia, which undoubtedly took its name from the 
faded divinity Kronos ; but of the Kronia the details known are 
not adequate for its fruitful examination. 

A cursory glance at the other festivals noted in our list shows 
that some, though not all, gave their names to the months in which 
they were celebrated, and (a fact of high significance) shows also 
that with one exception, the Dionysia, these festivals are not 
named after Olympian or indeed after any divinities. Metageitnia, 
the festival of ' changing your neighbours,' is obviously social or 
political. The Eleusinia are named after a place, so are the 
Munychia and Brauronia. The Thesmophoria, Oschophoria, Skiro- 
phoria and Arrephoria are festivals of ccwrying something ; the 
Anthesteria, Kallynteria, Plynteria festivals of persons who do 
something ; the Haloa a festival of threshing-floors, the Thargelia 
oi. first-fruits, the Bouphonia of ox-slaying, the Pyanepsia of hean- 
cooking. In the matter of nomenclature the Olympians are much 
to seek. 

The festivals in the table appended are arranged according to 
the official calendar for convenience of reference, but it should be 
noted that the agricultural year, on which the festivals primarily 
depend, begins in the autumn with sowing, i.e. in Pyanepsion. The 
Greek agricultural year fell into three main divisions, the autumn 
sowing season followed by the winter, the spring with its first 
blossoming of fruits and flowers beginning in Anthesterion, and 
the early summer harvest (oTrcopa) beginning in Thargelion, the 
month of first-fruits ; to this early harvest of grain and fruits was 
added with the coming of the vine the vintage in Boedromion, and 
the gathering in of the later fruits, e.g. the fig. All the festivals 
fall necessarily much earlier than the dates familiar to us in the 
North. In Greece to-day the wheat harvest is over by the middle 
or end of June. 

No attempt will be made to examine all the festivals, for two 
practical reasons, lack of space and lack of material ; but fortunately 



i] The Attic Calendar 31 

for us we have adequate material for the examination of one 
characteristic festival in each of the agricultural seasons, the 
Thesmophoria for autunin, the Anthesteria for spring, the Thar- 
gelia for early summer, and in each case the ceremonies of the 
several seasons can be further elucidated by the examination of 
the like ceremonies in the Roman calendar. To make clear the 
superposition of the two strata^ which for convenience' sake may 
be called Olympian and chthonic, the Diasia has already been 
examined. In the typical festivals now to be discussed a' like 
superposition will be made apparent, and from the detailed 
examination of the lower chthonic stratum it will be possible to 
determine the main outlines of Greek religious thought on such 
essential points as e.g. purification and sacrifice. 

It would perhaps be more methodical to begin the investigation 
with the autumn, with the sowing festival of the Thesmophoria, 
but as the Thesmophoria leads more directly to the consum- 
mation of Greek religion in the Mysteries it will be taken last. 
The reason for this will become more apparent in the further 
course of the argument. We shall begin with the Anthesteria. 

^ As regards the ethnography of these two strata, I accept Prof. Ridgeway's view 
that the earUer stratum, which I have called chthonic, belongs to the primitive 
population of the Mediterranean to which he gives the name Pelasgian ; the later 
stratum, to which belongs the manner of sacrifice I have called ' Olympian,' is 
characteristic of the Achaean population coming from the North. But, as I have 
no personal competency in the matter of ethnography and as Prof. Ridgeway's 
secoud volume is as yet unpublished, I have thought it best to state the argument 
as it appeared to me independently, i.e. that there are two factors in religion, one 
primitive, one later. Recent study has led me to feel that these factors are 
themselves, specially in the case of the primitive stratum, far more complex tban I 
at first thought. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE ANTHESTERIA. 

The Ritual of Ghosts and Spirits. 

Our examination of the unpromising Diasia has so far led 
us to the following significant, if somewhat vague, results. The 
festival in all probability did not originally belong to Zeus, 
but to a being called Meilichios, a snake god or demon. The 
worship of this being was characterized by nightly ceremonies, 
holocausts which the sun might not behold ; it was gloomy in 
character, potent for purification. The name of the festival is 
probably associated with dirae, curses, imprecations. 

The Diasia, gloomy though it is, is a spring festival and its 
significance will be yet more plainly apparent if we examine 
another, the other spring festival of the Greeks, i.e. the 
Anthesteria, which gives its name to the first spring month 
Anthesterion. 

If we know little about the Diasia, about the Anthesteria ^ we 
know much. Apollodorus, quoted by Harpocration, tells us that 
the whole festival collectively was called Anthesteria, that it was 
celebrated in honour of Dionysos, and that its several parts, i.e. its 
successive days, were known as Pithoigia (cask-opening), Choes 
(cups), Chytroi (pots). The exact date of the festival is fixed, 
the three successive days falling from the 11th to the 13th of 
Anthesterion I 

1 The sources for the Anthesteria are collected and discussed in the Lexicons of 
Pauly-Wissowa and of Daremberg and Saglio and more completely in Dr Martin 
Nilsson's Stiulia de Dionysiis Atticis (Lundae, 1900), which has been of great 
service to me. 

2 Harpocrat. s.v. 



CH. n] The AntJiesteria 33 

On the first day, the 11th of Anthesterion, i.e. the Pithoigia, 
Plutarch^ tells us 'they broached the new wine at Athens. 
It was an ancient custom,' he adds, ' to offer some of it as a 
libation before they drank it, praying at the same time that the 
use of the drug (^apfiaKou) might be rendered harmless and 
beneficial to them.' This is a clear case of the offering of first- 
fruits-. Among his own people, the Boeotians, Plutarch adds, ' the 
day was called the day of the Good Spirif*. the Agathos Daimon, 
and to him they made offerings. The month itself was known as 
Prostaterios.' The scholiast to Hesiod'* tells us that the festival 
was an ancestral one (ev toi<; Trarploi'i), and that it was not allow- 
able to hinder either household slaves or hired servants from 
partaking of the wine. 

The casks once opened, the revel set in and lasted through 
the next day (the Choes or Cups) and on through the third 
(the Chytroi or Pots). The day of the Choes seems to have 
been the climax, and sometimes gave its name to the whole 
festival. 

It is needless to dwell on all the details of what was in intent 
a three days' fair. A ' Pardon ' in the Brittany of to-day affords 
perhaps the nearest modern analogy. The children have holidays, 
fairings are bought, friends are feasted, the sophists get their 
fees, the servants generally are disorganized, and every one down 
to the small boys, as many a vase-painting tells us, is more or less 
drunk. There is a drinking contest presided over by the King 
Archon, he w^ho first drains his cup gets a cake, each man crowns 
his cup with a garland and deposits the wreath in keeping of the 
priestess of the sanctiiary of Dionysos in the Marshes. On the day 
of the Cups takes place the august ceremony of the wedding of the 
wife of the King Archon to the god Dionysos. On that day alone 
in all the year the temple of Dionysos is opened ■'. 

On the third day, the Chytroi or Pots, there was a dramatic 
contest** known as Xvrpivoi, Pot-contests. During this third 
day the revel went on; Aristophanes'' has left us the 

' Plut. Q. Syrup, in. 7. 1. 

- Tho gi.st oi' Huch olfc;iings will bo considered under the Tliuriirlia. 

" I'lut. (J. Sijvq). VIII. ."}. 

* Op. 'M)H. 

'• Discussed in relation to Dionysos, see infra, Chapter viii. 

« See p. 76. 

7 Ar. Jiau. 212, trans. Mr Gilbert Murray. 

H. 3 



34 The Anthesteria [ch. 

picture of the drunken mob thronging the streets at the holy 

Pot-Feast : 

' brood of the mere and the spring, 
Gather together and sing 

From the depths of your throat 

By the side of the boat 
Coax, as we move in a ring. 

As in Limnae we sang the divine 
Nyseian Giver of Wine, 

When the people in lots 

With their sanctified Pots 
Came reeling around my shrine.' 

The scholiast on the Acharnians^, a play which gives us a 
lively picture of the festival, says that the Choes and the Chytroi 
were celebrated on one day. The different days and acts of the 
whole Anthesteria were doubtless not sharply divided, and if each 
day was reckoned from sunrise to sunset confusion would easily 
arise. 

So far a cursory inspection clearly shows that the Anthesteria 
was a wine-festival in honour of Dionysos. Moreover we have the 
definite statement of Thucydides- that 'the more ancient Dionysia 
were celebrated on the 12th day of the month Anthesterion in the 
temple of Dionysos in the Marshes.' The reference can only be 
to the Choes, so that the festival of the Choes seems actually to 
have borne the name Dionysia. Harpocration^ goes even further; 
he says, quoting Apollodorus, that 'the whole month was sacred to 
Dionysos.' 

A more searching examination of the sources reveals beneath 
the surface rejoicings, as in the case of the Diasia, another and 
more primitive ritual, and a ritual of widely different significance. 
It has escaped no student of Greek festivals that through the 
Anthesteria there ran ' a note of sadness.' Things were not 
altogether so merry as they seemed. This has been variously 
explained, as due to the ' natural melancholy of the spring,' or 
more recently as evidence of the fact that Dionysos had his 
' chthonic side ' and was the ' Lord of souls.' A simpler ex- 
planation lies at the door. 

The clue to the real gist of the Anthesteria is afforded by 

1 Aristoph. Ach. 1076, scbol. ad loc. ^ Thucyd. ii. 15. 

^ Harpocrat. s.v. X6es. 



n] The CJn/troi 35 

a piece of ritual performed on the last day, the CkytroL The 
Greeks had a proverbial expression spoken, we are told, of those 
who 'on all occasions demand a repetition of favours received.' 
It ran as follows : ' Out of the doors ! ye Keres ; it is no longer 
Anthesteria.' Suidas^ has preserved for us its true signification ; 
it was spoken, he says, ' implying that in the Anthesteria the 
ghosts are going about in the city.' From this fragmentary state- 
ment the mandate, it is clear, must have been spoken at the close 
of the festival, so we cannot be wrong in placing it as the last act 
of the Chytroi. 

The statement of Suidas in itself makes the significance of the 
words abundantly clear, but close parallels are not wanting in the 
ritual of other races. The Lemuria at Rome is a case in point. 
According to Ovid- each father of a family as the festival came 
round had to lay the ghosts of his house after a curious and 
complex fashion. When midnight was come and all was still, he 
arose and standing with bare feet he made a special sign with his 
fingers and thumb to keep off any ghost. Thrice he washes his 
hands in spring water, then he turns round and takes black beans 
into his mouth ; with face averted he spits them away, and as he 
spits them says, ' These I send forth, with these beans I redeem 
myself and mine.' Nine times he speaks, and looks not back. 
The ghost, they believe, picks them up and follows behind if no 
one looks. Again he touches the water and strikes the brass of 
Temesa and begs the ghost to leave his house. When nine times 
he has said, 'Shades of my fathers, depart' (Manes exite paterni !), 

^ Suidas s.v. ^t//3afe- l^oj ttjs Ovpcu- 

Ovpa^e Kapes, ovk ^t' 'AvOecrr-qpia, 
ot /JLfi/ Sia w\ri6os olKiTwv KapiKQv elprjadai (paaiv, ws iv rois ' AvOeffTTjpioii evwxov/x^vwv 
aiiTuiv Kal ovk epya^o/xei'cji'. rrji ovv eopTTJs TeXeadeicn]'! Xiyav iirl to. ^pya. eKiriiiirovTai 
avTovs ■ 

Ovpa^e Kapes, ouk ?t' ' A-vOear-qpia. 
Tives 06 ovTU) TTjV TTapoL/j-lap (paai' 

dvpa^e KTjpez, ovk ^vi 'Avdeffrripia, 
U3S Kara Tr)v ir6\iv tois ' AvdecTTripioii tCiv ^j/vx<^v irepi.epxop^ivwv. 
Photius 8.V. substantially identical. 

To the information here given Zenobius {Cent. Paroimiogr.) adds: Eiprjrai di r) 
irapoip-ia iwl tCiv to. olvto. itn^-r)TovvTO}i> irdvroTe Xa/j.jSdi'eti'. It is fortunate that Suidas 
records his second conjecture, as his first is rendered plausible by the fact tliat we 
know the household servants were admitted to the Pithoigia. Probably in classical 
days KTJpes had already become an old fashioned word for souls and the formulary 
may have been easily misunderstood. Mouunsen in his second edition {FfsU; tier 
Stadt Athan, p. aBfi) argues that the form /c^pej is impossil)le Itecause 'Gespenstcrn 
zeigt man nicht die Thiir wie einem lieltler,' a dilliculty that will scarcely bo felt 
by any one acquainted with primitive customs. 

■^ Ovid, Fasti v. 143. 

3—2 



36 The Anthesteria [ch. 

he looks back and holds that the rite has been duly done. We 
cannot impute to the Anthesteria all the crude minutiae of the 
Lemuria, but the content is clearly the same — the expulsion of 
ancestral ghosts. The Lemuria took place not in the spring but 
in the early summer, May — a time at which ceremonies of puri- 
fication were much needed. 

A second striking parallel is recorded by Mr Tylor^ He says 
of a like Sclavonic custom, 'when the meal was over the priest 
rose from the table and hunted out the souls of the dead like 
fleas with these words : " Ye have eaten and drunk, souls, now go, 
now go".' Dr Oldenberg- calls attention to another analogy. 
In sacrifices in India to the dead the souls of ancestors are first 
invoked, then bidden to depart, and even invited to return again 
after the prescribed lapse of a month. 

The formula used at the close of the Anthesteria is in itself 
ample proof that the Anthesteria was a festival of All Souls ; 
here at last we know for certain what was dimly shadowed in the 
Diasia, that some portion at least of the ritual of the month 
Anthesterion was addressed to the powers of the underworld, 
and that these powers were primarily the ghosts of the dead. 
The evidence is not however confined to an isolated proverbial 
formulary. The remaining ritual of the Chytroi confirms it. 
Before they were bidden to depart the ghosts were feasted and 
after significant fashion. 

The scholiast on Aristophanes ^ commenting on the words rot? 
iepoiai 'K.vrpoLo-i, ' at the holy Pot-feast,' explains the ceremonies 
as follows : ' The Chytroi is a feast among the Athenians ; the 
cause on account of which it is celebrated is explained by Theo- 

pompos who writes thus: "They have the custom of sacrificing 

at this feast, not to any of the Olympian gods at all, but to Hermes 
Chthonios"; and again in explaining the word ')(VTpa, pot: "And 
of the pot which all the citizens cook none of the priests tastes, 

1 Primitive Culture ii. p. 40. ^ Religion des Vedas, p. 553. 

^ Schol. ad Ar. i?<m. 218 To?s iepoicrt XiVpoicrr Xvrpot. eoprr] -rrap^ 'Adtjvaiois' ayerai 
he vapa Tavrrjv rijv airiav, rjv /cat QeoTro/UTros iKTideraL ypd<pwv ovrcos' < > ...^'Tretra" 

6v€Lv avTols 'idos e'xoi'crt tuv p-kv "OXv/jlttLwu OeCiv ovbevl to irap6.Trav, 'Epp-rj 5e x^o^^'i'- 
Kal Trjs xvrpas, iji' ei/'Oi'crt navTes oi Kara tt]v iroXiv, ovSeh yeverat tQv lepeuv • rovro 5i 
TTOioOffL rrj <ty > yjpLipa. Kai ' roiis rore irapayiuop^vovs iiwep tQiv dTroBavovrciiv 
IXdaacrdai tov 'Epp-iju. iepuv Eav., (ep^wi' Yen.: whichever be followed, the mandate 
of not tasting is clear. 



ii] The Chytroi 37 

they do this on the (13th) day"; and again: "Those present 
appease Hermes on behalf of the dead ".' The scholiast on 
another passage in Aristophanes^ says substantially the same, 
but adds, again on the authority of Theopompos, that the practice 
of cooking the dish of seeds was observed by those who were 
saved from the deluge on behalf of those who perished. The 
deluge is of course introduced from a desire to get mythological 
precedent; the all-important points are that the ')(^vTpa, the dish of 
grain and seeds, was offered to none of the Olympians, not even 
to Dionysos in whose honour the festival was ostensibly celebrated, 
but only to Hermes Chthonios, Hermes of the Underworld, and 
that of this sacrifice no man tasted. It was no sacrifice of com- 
munion, but like the holocaust made over utterly to dread chthonic 
powers, and behind this notion of sacrifice to the underworld 
deities lay the still earlier notion that it was dead men's food, 
a supper for the souls. 

Before we leave the -^vrpa it is necessary to examine more 
precisely the name of the day, Chytroi. August Mommsen ^ has 
emphasized the fact, too much neglected, that the name of the 
festival is masculine, ol 'xyrpoi not at ')(yrpai. The feminine 
form ')(VTpat means pots artificially made ; the masculine form 
•X^vrpoi, which occurs far less frequently, means in ordinary parlance 
natural pots, i.e. holes in the ground. Pausanias^ speaks of a certain 
natural bath at Thermopylae which the country people called ' the 
Chytroi of the women ' ; and Herodotos^ describes it in the same 
terms. Theophrastos^ in his History of Plants speaks of a certain 
plant as growing in a place between the Kephisos and the Melas, 
' the place being called Pelekania, i.e. certain hollows in the marsh, 
the so-called Pot-holes.' Hesychius", interpreting ol ■^vrpivoi, says 
they are ' the hollow places of the earth through which springs 
come up.' The word KoXvfjL^rjdpa itself, in classical Greek a 
natural pool, became in mediaeval Greek a font, and it may be 

1 Schol. ad Ar. Ach. 1076 X^rpovs- Oe6irofiiroi tovs SiaffwdkvTa^ U rov KaTaKkvafiov 
ifriaal (p-qcn xiJTpas Travainpula^ lidfv ovtu KXrjOrjvai, ttj^ iopriju . . .ttjs 5k x^Tpo-S ovd^fa 
yeixraaOai.. 

2 Fexte der Stadt Athen, p. 385. 

^ P. IV. ii'). 9 Ko\vfj.[irjOpa 'rjVTLva 6voh6.^ov<tlv ol iirix^P^o'- X"'"'/""'' yvvaiKdoxii. 
* Herod, viii. 170. 

•"' Theoph. Hint. Plant, iv. II. H ovrot 8k 6 rbno^ wpoaayopeveTai p.lv UiXtKavla., 
TOVTO 5' i(TTlv &TTa X"'''P°'- Ka\ov/J.(voi jiaOv(T/J.aTa Trjs }\.ip.vi]i. 
^ He.sych. h.v. oi x'^TpLvoi. 



38 The A^ithesteria [ch. 

noted that the natural chasms that occur in western Yorkshire 
still locally bear the name of ' Pots.' 

It is possible therefore that the festival took its name from 
natural holes in the ground in the district of the Limnae where it 
was celebrated, a district to this day riddled with Turkish cisterns 
made of great earthen jars (771601). Such holes may have been 
used for graves, and were in many parts of Greece regarded as the 
constant haunt of ghosts going up and down. They were perhaps 
the prototypes of the ' chasms in the earth ' seen in the vision of 
Er\ Near akin were the megara or chasms of Demeter at 
Potniae-, and the clefts on and about the Pnyx where the women 
celebrated the Thesmophoria (p. 125). Such chasms would be the 
natural sanctuaries of a Ge and ghost cult. 

It is obvious that the two forms 'xyrpot and 'xyrpac would 
easily pass over into each other, and it is hard to say which came 
first. It is also to be noted that, though the masculine form more 
often means natural hole, it is also used for artificial pot. Pollux^ 
in discussing 'the vessels used by cooks,' says that when Delphilos 
speaks of the big pot {')(VTpov /meyav) at the cook's, he clearly 
means the ')(yTpa, not the foot-pan {')(yTp6'rToha). Though the 
form "^vrpoL ultimately established itself, the associations of 
Xvrpa, artificial pot, seem to have prevailed, and these associa- 
tions are important and must be noted. 

Hesychius'' says that by (papfxaKt] is meant the xu'^P"' which 
they prepared for those who cleansed the cities. From the 
scholiast on the Choephor'oi of Aeschylus^ we learn that the 
Athenians purified their houses with a censer made of a pot ; 
'this they threw away at the meeting of three ways and went 
away without turning back.' Here we have of course the origin 
of ' Hecate's suppers.' These were primarily not feasts for the 
goddess but purification ceremonies, of which, as no mortal might 
taste them, it was supposed an infernal goddess partook. The day 
of the Chytroi was a day of such purifications. From some such 
notion arose the Aristophanic word ijx^Tpl(^eLv,'to pot,' i.e. to utterly 
ruin and destroy, to make away with. The scholiast® explains it as 



1 Plato, Rep. 614 c. 2 P. ix. 8. ^ Qn. x. 99. 

■* Hesych. s.v. (pap/j.aKri' tj x^'''P°- V" riToifJ.a'i^ov rots Kadaipovai rds 7r6Xet5. 

5 V. 96. 

6 Schol. ad Ar. Vesp. 289. 



ii] The Choes 39 

referring to the practice of exposing children, but Suidas^ knows 
of another meaning ; he says the e<y')(yTpi<jrpLai were those 'women 
who purified the unclean, pouring upon them the blood of the 
victim,' and also those who 'poured libations to the dead,' those in 
a word who performed ceremonies of placation and purgation. 

It is curious that, though most modern writers from Crusius 
onwards have recognised that the Chytroi was a dies nefastus and 
in the main a festival of ghosts, this day has been separated off 
from the rest of the Anthesteria, and the two previous days have 
been regarded as purely drinking festivals : — the Pithoigia the 
opening of the wine-cask, the Choes the drinking of the wine- 
cups. And yet for the second day, the Choes, literary testimony 
is explicit. Spite of the drinking contest, the flower-wreathed 
cups and the wedding of Dionysos, all joyful elements of the 
service of the wine-god, the Choes was a dies nefastus, an unlucky 
day, a day to be observed with apotropaic precautions. Photius -, 
in explaining the words fitapa rjfiepa, ' day of pollution,' says such 
a day occurred 'in the Choes in the month of Anthesterion, in 
which (i.e. during the Choes) they believed that the spirits of 
the dead rose up again. From early morning they used to chew 
buckthorn and anointed their doors with pitch.' Buckthorn, 
known to modem botanists as Rhamnus catharticus, is a plant of 
purgative properties. The ancient Athenian, like the modern 
savage, believed that such plants have the power of keeping off 
evil spirits, or rather perhaps of ejecting them when already in 
possession. Chewing a substance was naturally a thorough and 
efficient way of assimilating its virtues. The priestess of Apollo 
chewed the laurel leaf. It seems possible that she may have 
primarily had to do this rather as a means of ejecting the bad 
spiiits than to obtain inspiration from the good. Fasting is a 
substantial safe-guard, but purgation more drastically effective. 
The prophylactic properties of rhamnus, buckthorn, wore well 
known to the ancients. Dioscorides •' in his Materia Medica 

' Suidas s.v. iyxvYpicrTpiai.- ai ras x""' ''"'''^ rereXeuTrjKSa-iv iiri<pipovaai...i'}ix^P'-' 
(TTpia^ oi X^yeffdai Kal offai tous ti/ayei^ Kadalpov<Ti.v, al/xa ^irixiovaai iepelov. 

'■' Pliotius s.v. niapa ri/x^pa- iv Toh Xovalv ' AvOeaT-qpiCivos nrjuui, tV (^ doKovffiv at 
xj/tfXal Twv TeXdirrjadvTWi' avUuai, pd/xfuu iwOev iixaaCjvro Kal ttIttji rds Ovpai exptof- 

•' DioBC. De mot. mcd. i. IIIJ X^yirai ok Kal K\C]va.^ auTrj$ Ovpaii ij Ovpaai irpoare- 
O^vrai diroKpovdv rds tQv (Itap/xaKuiv KaKovpyla^. For this rcfcroncd I nm indebted tO 
the kindncBS of Dr Frazer, who also notes tliat in Ovid xpinu nllxi, wliitc thorn, ifl 



40 The Anthesteria [ch. 

writes, ' it is said that branches of this plant attached to doors 
or hung up outside repel the evil arts of magicians.' Possibly, 
in addition to the chewing of buckthorn, branches of it were 
fastened to doors at the festival of the Choes, and served the same 
purpose as the pitch. Pitch, Photius tells us in commenting on 
rhamnus, was on account of its special purity used also to drive 
away sprites at the birth of a child — always a perilous momenta 

It is not easy to imagine an enlightened citizen of the Athens 
of the fifth century B.C., an Aeschylus, a Pericles, chewing buck- 
thorn from early dawn to keep off the ghosts of his ancestors, but 
custom in such matters has an iron hand. If the masters of the 
house shirked the chewing of buckthorn, the servants would see 
to it that the doors were at least anointed with pitch ; it is best 
to be on the safe side in these matters, and there is the public 
opinion of conservative neighbours to be considered. Be this as 
it may, it is quite clear that the day of the Choes was a day of 
ghosts like the day of the Chytroi. 

But, if tlie ceremonies of the Choes clearly indicate the ' un- 
lucky ' nature of the day, what is to be made of the name ? 
Nothing, as it stands. Choes, Caps, are undeniably cheerful. But, 
as in the case of Chytroi, there may have been a confusion 
between approximate forms ; the two words x°V> funeral libation, 
and %o{)9, cup, have a common stem ;)^ojr. May not ^oe? have 
superimposed itself on x^'''^' wine-cups upon funeral libations ? 
A scholiast on Aristophanes - seems to indicate some such a con- 
taminatio. In explaining the word %oa9, he says the meaning is 
' pourings forth, offerings to the dead or libations. An oracle was 
issued that they must offer libations (x^f^'i) yearly to those of the 
Aetolians who had died, and celebrate the festival so called.' Here 
the name of a festival X.od<i is oxytone, and though we cannot 

placed in a window to keep off tristes noxas and striges (Ovid, Fasti vi. 129 — 163), 
and compares the English notion that hawthorn keeps off witches (see Golden Boiuih, 
second edit. vol. i. p. 124, note 3). Miss M. C. Harrison tells me that to this day 
rue [ritta) is eaten on Ascension Day at Pratola Peligna and other places in the 
Abruzzi, "that the witches may not come to torment our children" (noi mangiamo 
la ruta affinche le streghe non vengano a tormentare le creature nostre) ; see A. De 
Nino, Usi Abruzzesi i. p. 168. 

1 Phot. s.v. pd/xuos- (pvrbv 5 iv toTs Xovcriv J;s d\f^L<pdp/xaKov ifiaaQvTO eoidev, Kal 
ttLttt] expi-ovTO to. Sci^ara, dixiavro's yap aiJTij- did /cat iv rais yeviaecn tu>v TraiBiuv 
Xpi-ovffL rds ot'/ctas et's dTreXacrii' tQjv 8ai/jL6vwv. 

- Schol. ad Ar. Acli. 961 Xods* 67xi^cre(s, evayia-fxaTa iirl veKpoU r} cnrovdds. 
iKTriwreL xPV^f^'o^ ^f''' XO^ts rots Tednewai tQv MtuiXwv iirdyetv dvd. irdv Iros /cat 
€OpTT]v Xods &yei.v. 



ii] The Choes 41 

assume that it was identical with the Athenian Choes, it looks as 
if there was some confusion as to the two analogous forms. 

If we view the Choes as Xoal, the Cups as Libations, the 
anomalous and, as it stands, artificial connection of Orestes with 
the festival becomes at once clear. At the drinking bout of the 
Choes, we learn from Athenaeus' and other authorities, the 
singular custom prevailed that each man should drink by himself 
A mythological reason was sought to account for this, and the 
story was told- that Orestes, polluted by the blood of his mother, 
came to Athens at the time of the celebration of the Choes. The 
reigning king, variously called Pandion and Phanodemus, wished 
to show him hospitality, but religious scruple forbade him to let 
a man polluted enter the Sanctuaries or drink with those cere- 
monially clean. He therefore ordered the Sanctuaries to be shut 
and a measure of wine (%o{)9) to be set before each man severally, 
and bade them, when they had finished drinking, not to offer up 
the garlands with which they had been crowned in the Sanctuaries, 
because they had been under the same roof with Orestes ; but he 
bade each man place his wreath round his own cup, and so bring 
them to the priestess at the precinct of the Limnae. That done, 
they were to perform the remaining sacrifices in the Sanctuary. 
From this, Athenaeus adds, the festival got the name of Cups. 
The mad Orestes in the Iphigenia in Tauris^ tells the same tale 
and naively states that, though he was hurt by the procedure, he 
dare not ask the reason, knowing it all too well. 

The whole account is transparently aetiological. Some mytho- 
logical precedent is desired for the drinking bout of the Choes, 
based as it was on a ceremony of funeral libations ; it is sought and 
found or rather invented in the canonical story of Orestes, and he 
is made to say in a fashion almost too foolish even for a madman: 

'And this I learn, tliat my mishap.s became 
A rite for the Athenians ; and I 'alias' ft)llv 
Have still this custom that they reverence 
The Choan vessel.' 

If we suppose that the Cups (xoe?) were originally Libations 
(X^ai), the somewhat strained punctilio of the host becomes at 
least intelligible. Orestes is polluted by thf guilt (ayo<i) <»f his 

• Athen. vii. 2, p. 27G. 

2 Athen. x. 49, p. 437 and Suidas h.v. X6es. =* Eur. Iph. in T. !»rj:J Roq. 



42 The Aiitliesteria [ch. 

mother's blood, he finds the people in the LimnaeS close to the 

Areopagos, celebrating the Xoai, the libations to the dead ; till 

he is purified from kindred blood he cannot join : all is simple 

and clear. 

If the Choes were in intent x°^^' ^^^® Cups Libations, the 

ceremony has an interesting parallel in a rite performed at the 

Eleusinian mysteries. Athenaeus", in discussing various shapes 

of cups says : ' The plemochoe is an earthen vessel shaped like 

a top that stands fairly steady ; some call it, Pamphilos tells us, 

the cotyliscus. And they use it at Eleusis on the last day of the 

mysteries, which takes its name Plemochoai from the cup. On 

this day they fill two plemochoae and set them up, the one towards 

the East, the other towards the West, and pronounce over them a 

magic formula. The author of the Peirithous mentions them, 

whether he be Ktesias the Tyrant or Euripides, as follows : 

"That these plemochoae down the Chthonian chasm 
With words well-omened we may pom\"' 

It is at least significant that a compound of the word %o?^ 
should both give its name to a festival day and to a vessel 
used in chthonic ritual. 

The Chytroi and Choes then bear unmistakeably a character of 
gloom, and in their primary content are festivals of ghosts. But 
what of the Pithoigia ? Surely this day is all revel and jollity, all 
for Dionysos ? 

Had we been dependent on literature alone, such would have 
been our inevitable conclusion. In Plutarch's account of the 
Pithoigia (p. 83), the earliest and fullest we possess, there is 
no hint of any worship other than that of the wine-god, no hint 
of possible gloom. Eustathius* indeed tells of a Pithoigia or Jar- 
opening which was ' not of a festal character, but in every respect 
unlucky,' but this is the Pithoigia, the Jar-opening, of Pandora. 
Here we have a hint that a Pithoigia need not be an opening of 
wine-jars; there are other jars, other openings, but save for 
the existence of one small fragile monument the significance of 
the hint would have escaped us. 

1 For the topographical question see my Primitive Athens, p. 83. 

2 Athen. xi. 93, p. 496. 

3 Eustath. ad II. xxiv. 526, p. 1363. 26 ovx eopTd<nixo^...dX\' es rb irdv dwo(ppds. 



n] 



The Pltholgla 



43 




^^^J^j^jaJ^jSJHJ 




In the vase-painting in fig. 7 from a lekythos in the University 
Museum of Jena^ we see a Pith- 
oigia of quite other and more 
solemn intent. A large pitJios 
is sunk deep into the ground. 
It has served as a grave. In 
primitive days many a man, 
Diogenes-like, lived the ' life 
of the jar ' {^(orj irlOov), but not 
from philosophy, rather from 
dire necessity. During the Pelo- 
ponnesian war, when the city was 
crowded with refugees, ajar (7rt- 
OaKvq) was a welcome shelter^ 
A man's home during his life is 
apt to be his grave in death. 
In the Dipylon Cemetery at 
Athens, at Aphidna^ at Corfu, 
at Thoricus, and in many an- 
other burying place, such grave pithoi have come to light. From 
the grave-jar in fig. 7 the lid has been removed ; out of it have 
escaped, fluttering upward, two winged Keres or souls, a third 
soul is in the act of emerging, a fourth is diving headlong back 
into the jar. Hermes Psychopompos, with his magic staff in his 
hand, is evoking, ?^evoking the souls. The picture is a speaking 
commentary on the Anthesteria ; we seem to hear the mandate 
' Out of the doors ! ye souls ; it is no longer Anthesteria ! ' The 
Pithoigia of the Anthesteria is the primitive Pithoigia of the 
^rave-jars, later overlaid by the Pithoigia of the wine-]axH. 

The vase-painting in fig. 7 must not be regarded as an actual 
conscious representation of the Athenian rite performed on the 
first day of the Anthesteria. It is more general in content; it is 
in fact simply a representation of ideas familiar to every Greek, 
that the pithos was a grave-jar, that from such grave-jars souls 



Fig. 7. 



' First publislicd by Dr Paul Schadow, Eine Attixche Gnthlcki/thos, Imiuunnih 
Dissertation (Jena, IH'JT), reproduced and diHCUSsed by the present writer J. U.S. 
XX. p. 101. 

- Ar. AV/. 7!)2. Mr K. A. Neil ad loc. points out that irLOos answers to ftdelia in 
etymology, to doUum in meaning. 

3 Dr Sam. Wide, 'Aphidna in Nord-Attica,' A. Mitt. 189G, p. 398. 



44 The Anthesteria [ch. 

escaped and to them necessarily returned, and that Hermes was 
Psychopompos, Evoker and Revoker of souls. The vase-painting 
is in fact only another form of the scene so often represented on 
Athenian white lekythoi, in which the souls flutter round the 
grave-stele. The grave-jar is but the earlier form of sepulture; 
the little winged figures, the Keres, are identical in both classes 
of vase-painting. 

The nature of these Keres will be further analysed when we 
come to the discussion of primitive demonology. For the present 
it is enough to note that the Keres in the vase-paintings and the 
Keres of the Anthesteria are regarded as simply souls of dead 
men, whereas the little winged phantoms that escape from 
Pandora's jar are indeed ghosts, but ghosts regarded rather as 
noisome sprites than as spirits; they are the source of disease 
and death rather than dead men's souls. The jar of Pandora 
is not so much a grave as a store-house of evil ; the pithos as 
store-house not only of wine but of grain and all manner of 
provisions was familiar to the Greeks. The ordinary pithos was 
pointed at the base and buried permanently in the earth like a 
Turkish cistern ; a row of such pithoi, like those recently unearthed 
at Cnossus, might serve equally as a wine-cellar or a granary or a 
cemetery. 

The attributes of Hermes in the vase-painting in fig. 7 are 
noticeable. In one hand he holds his familiar herald's staff, the 
kerykeion. But, and this is the interesting point, he is not using 
it ; it is held in the left hand, inert ; it is merely attributive, present 
out of convention. The real implement of his agency in revoking 
the souls is held uplifted in the right hand ; it is his rhabdos, his 
magic wand. 

This rhabdos is, I think, clearly to be distinguished from the 
kerykeion, though ultimately the two became contaminated. The 
kerykeion or herald's staff is in intent a king's sceptre held by 
the herald as deputy ; it is a staff, a walking-stick, a ^uKxpov, 
by which you are supported ; the rhabdos is a simple rod, even 
a pliable twig, a thing not by which you are supported but with 
which you sway others. It is in a word the enchanter's wand. 

It is with a rhabdos that Circe ^ transforms the comrades of 

1 Od. X. 236. 



n] The Pithoigia 45 

Odysseus into swine ; it is as magical as the magic potion they 
drink : 

' Straight with her rhabdos smote she them and penned them in the sties.' 

With the rhabdos Hermes^ led the ghosts of the slain suitors 
to Hades. He held in his hand 

' His rhabdos fair and golden wherewith he hills to rest 
The eyes of men whoso he will, and others by his best 
He wakes from sleep. He stirred the ghosts ; they followed to their doom 
And gibbered like the bats that throng and gibber in the gloom.' 

This magic wand became the attribute of all who hold sway 
over the dead. It is the wand, not the sceptre, that is the token 
of life or death, as Pindar^ shows : 

'Xor did Hades the king 
Forget his wand to wave 
Whereby he doth bring 
Shapes of men dying 
Adown the hollow roadway of the grave.' 

The rhabdos as magic wand was Tretcri/S/Joro?, enchanter of the 
dead, before it became as sceptre Tretcrt/S/ooro?, ruler of mortals. 

Eustathius tells us in the passage already discussed^ that the 
kerykeion was also called tto/xtto?, conductor, and that it was 
carried in the hands of those who performed ceremonies of purifi- 
cation. He is trying, it will be remembered, to derive the words 
SioTTO/jLTreiv and dTroBooTrofMrreiv. When an ancient author is trying 
to derive words, we are bound to accept his statements only with 
the utmost caution ; still in this particular instance there seems no 
reason for suspecting the statement that the kerykeion was called 
TTo/xTTo? ; it is dragged in quite gratuitously, and does not help out 
the proposed derivation. What Eustathius says is this: 'At the 
end of the month Maimakterion they perform ceremonies of sending, 
among which was the carrying of the magic fleece, and there take 

1 Od. XXIV. 1—9. 

2 Find. 01. IX. 33 

oi)5' '\t5as 6.Kivr)Tav ix^ pdjidov 
ppbrea. auifiaO' ^ Kardyei. KoiXav Trpbs dyvidv 
dvaiTKbvTWv. 
d-KLviyrav is usually rendered ' unraised ' as though the sceptre were lifted in token 
of kingly power. I translate by ' wave ' because I believe tlie action denoted is the 
waving or moving of a wand, not the raising of a sceptre. TIk^ verb Kiviu is, 
I believe, characteristic of tliis wand-wiiving. kiv(u) is used in Homer (loc. cit.) 
T^ o' dye Kivqaas. By I'indsir's time IIk- wiuid and the sceptre were fused, but 
he is haunted by the old connotation of magic. 
' For text, see p. 24, note 2. 



46 The Anthesteria [ch. 

place then throwings out of purifications at the crossways, and 
they hold in their hands the pompos (i.e. conductor), which 
they say is the kerykeion, the attribute of Hermes.' The object 
of the whole ceremony is ' to send out polluted things.' It is, 
I think, significant that the kerykeion, or rather to be strictly 
accurate the rhabdos^ was carried in apotropaic ceremonies, pre- 
sumably with a view to exorcise bad spirits, which as will appear 
later were regarded as the source of all impurities. It is the 
other face of revocation ; the rhabdos is used either for the raising 
or the laying of ghosts, for the induction (iTraycoy^]) of good spirits, 
for the exorcism (drroTpoTn]) of bad. 

In discussing the Anthesteria on a previous occasion", I felt 
confident that in the opening of the grave-jars we had the complete 
solution of the difficulty of the unlucky character of the day 
Pithoigia. It seems to me now in the light of further investi- 
gation that another ritual element may have gone to its deter- 
mination. 

Plutarch', in discussing the nature of the sacred objects 
committed to the care of the Vestal Virgins, makes the following 
notable statement : ' Those who pretend to have most special 
knowledge about them (i.e. the Vestal Virgins) assert that there 
are set there two jars (ttlOoi,) of no great size, of which the one is 
open and empty, the other full and sealed up, and neither of them 
may be seen except by these all-holy virgins. But others think 
that this is false, and that the idea arose from the fact that the 
maidens then placed most of their sacred things in two jars, and 
hid them underground below the temple of Quirinus, and that the 
place even now is called from that by the title Pithisci (Doliola).' 
We have two other notices of these Doliola. Varro-* says : ' The 
place which is called Doliola is at the Cloaca Maxuma, where 
people are not allowed to spit. It is so called from the jars 
beneath the earth. Two accounts are given of these jars : some 

1 Space forbids the discussion of the whole evolution of the kerykeion. It 
contains elements drawn from both sceptre and rhabdos. The rhabdos is sometimes 
forked like a divining rod : the forks were entwined in various shapes. Eound the 
rhabdos a snake, symbol of the underworld, was sometimes curled as the snake 
is curled round the staff of Aesculapius. Ultimately the twisted ends of the 
rhabdos were crystallized into curled decorative snakes. In like fashion the frayed 
fringe of the leather aegis of Athene is misunderstood and rendered as snakes. By 
the time of Eustathius, kerykeion and rhabdos are not clearly differentiated. 

2 J.H.S. XX. p. 101. 3 Plut. Vit. Cam. xx. 
•* Ling. Lat. 5 § 157. 



ii] Derivation of Antliesteria 47 

say they contain the bones of dead bodies, others that after the 

death of Numa Pompilius certain sacred objects (religiosa quae- 

dam) were buried there.' Festus^ gives substantially the same 

account, but he says that the sacred objects were buried there 

when the Gauls invaded the city. 

Of jars containing 'sacra' we have in Greece no knowledge, 

but it is significant to find that Zeus, who was the heir to so 

much antique ritual, had on his threshold in Olympus two jars, 

one containing good the other evil-: 

' Jars twain upon Zeus' threshold ever stood ; 
One holds his gifts of evil, one of good.' 

With some such notion as that of the Pithoigia must have 
been connected the ceremony of the opening of the mundus or 
round pit on the Palatine. Festus^ tells us that on three days 
in the year, August 24, October 5, November 6, the lapis manalis 
that covered it was removed. Varro, quoted by Macrobius-*, adds : 
' when the mundus is open, the gate of the doleful underworld gods 
is open.' 

It has been shown that the ritual of each of the several days 
points determinedly ghost-wards. The names in each case admit 
at least of chthonic interpretation. It remains to examine the 
collective name Antliesteria. 

The ancients sought and found what was to them a satisfactory 
etymology. Istros, writing in the third century B.C. and quoted by 
Harpocration, says that Anthesterion is the blossoming month 
because then ' the most of the things that spring from the earth 
blossom forth^' The Etymologicon Magnum^ offers an easy-going 
alternative : feast and month bear their names either because the 
earth then began to blossom, or because they offered flowers at 
the festival. 

It was not the habit of those days to trouble about 'verb-stems' 
and ' nouns of the agent in T7?p,' but it is surprising to find that 
the dubious guess hazarded by Istros should have passed so long 

' J'aiili excerpLa ex Lib. I'oinp. Fest. s.v. doliola. 
- Iliad XXIV. 527 

8oiol ydp T£ irldoL KuraKelaTai iu Aibs ov5(f) 

duipuf ola 8l5u(n KaKwv Irepos 5^ fduv. 
» Fest. 154. * Macr. Sat. i. l(\. iH. 

' Harpocrat. s.v. 'AvOtcrT. otd t6 irXdaTa rOiv ik r^s 7(75 dvOiiv rbre. 
" Etijm. May. s.v. AvOtarripia. 



48 The Anthesteria [ch. 

unchallenged by modern science, the more so as flowers have but 
a general and accidental connection with the ritual of the feast. 
Are scholars really content with an etymology that makes of the 
Anthesteria the festival of those who ' did the flowers ' ? 

In a recent paper in the Hellenic Journal'^ Dr A. W. Verrall 
has faced the difficulty and offered a new solution. The names of 
festivals, he points out, are no exception to the rule that nouns in 
TT^pio are normally formed from verb-stems through the ' noun of 
the agent ' in rifjp, and take their sense from the action described 
by the verb, as crfOTi]pLo<i, Xvrrjpiof;, ^ovXevrrjpLov. In like fashion 
the names of festivals ending in Trjpia describe the action in which 
the ceremony consisted, or with which it was chiefly connected. 
Thus dvaK\7]rrjpia is a feast or ceremony of avaK\rjcn^y avaKaXvir- 
Trjpta of dvaKoXv-yln^ and so on. Prima facie then a derivation 
of Anthesteria should start from the assumption that the stem 
is verbal. 

' But we need not assume that the verbal stem is dvOea--. 
Perhaps avdecr- itself needs analysis ; and for the first syllable 
there is an obviously possible origin in the preposition dv- (dvd), 
of which so many examples (e.g. dvdefxa = dvdOefia) are preserved 
in the poets. The verb-stem will then be deer-, which is in fact a 
verb-stem and has more than one meaning. The meaning which 
would perhaps in any case have suggested itself first, and which 
now seems especially attractive, is that which appears in the 
archaic verb OeaaaOat or dea-aaadai to pray or pray for'\ and 
in the adjectives iroXvOecno'; and diroOecrro'i. Prayers and invo- 
cations addressed to the dead were a regular part of the proceed- 
ings by which they were brought back to the world of the living. 
The compound dvaOeaaaaOat would, after the analogy of dvaKaXelv 
and the like, bear the sense to raise by prayer or to recall by 
prayer, literally " to pray up " or " pray back." And dvOecrTrjpLa, 
derived from dvadeaaaaOai, would be the feast of revocation, the 
name, as usual, signifying the action in which the ceremony con- 
sisted and which was the object of it^' 

In connection with this new and illuminating etymology, it is 
interesting to note that even in their misguided derivation from 

1 J.H.S. XX. 115. 2 0^ X. 526. 

3 My view of the primitive significance of the root deer, which is perhaps 
primarily rather to conjure than to pray, will appear more clearly when we come 
to the discussion of the Thesmophoria. 



ii] Anthesterion and Fehnmry 49 

avdo'i the ancients themselves lay stress not so much on the 
flowers as on the rising up^ the avOelv in r?}? 77)9. Under the 
word "AvOeia the EUjmologicon Magnum says ' a title of Hera 
when she sends up (dvirjac) fruits,' where there seems a haunting 
of the true meaning though none of the formr. 

Dr Verrall declines to assert positively the derivation of 
Anthesteria he propounds, but a second philological argument 
brings certain conviction. Mr R. A. Neil suggests that the root 
which appears in Greek as ^e? may appear as fes fer in Latin. 
This gives us the delightful equation or rather analogy dv-Oea- 
T)]pia, in-fe7'-iae. Of course inferiae is usually taken as from 
inferi, infra etc., but no Latin word ought to have medial y except 
when preceded by a separable prefix. To make certainty more 
certain we have the Feralia, the festival of All Souls, kept from 
the 13th to the 21st of the month of Fe(b)ruary. The month of 
purification is the month of rites to the dead, in a word purgation 
is the placation of souls. This is true for Latin and Greek alike 
and will emerge more clearly when we come to study in detail the 
ritual of the month of February. 

Anthesterion and February. 

The general analogy between the months of Anthesterion and 
February, and the fact that both alike were unlucky and given 
over to the service of the dead, was clear to the ancients them- 
selves. The scholiast on Lucian's Timon^, commenting on the 
word Diasia, says: 'The day is unlucky... there were among the 
Greeks certain days which brought with them complete idleness 

^ DrWuensch in his instructive ))aiuplilct Kin Frlihlinnsfi'st (uif Malta (Leipzig, 
1902J discusses a spring festival of the th)wering of beans whicli he believes to be 
analogous to the Anthesteria, but the rites practised are wholly different. Dr Hiller 
von (jaertringen {Festschrift fiir O. lienndorf) calls attention to the title Anthister 
which occurs in an inscription found on Tliera, but the inscrijition is of the second 
century u.c, the festival of the 'Anthc^steria ' was c('lt;brati'd on Thera, as indeed 
wherever there was a primitive population, and Anihistcr must liave borrowed rather 
than lent his name. 

'^ Archbishop Eustathius may have had a dim consciousness of tlie separable 
iva when he says dvOos on 4k toO avadiuv irafirJKTai Kara avyKOTri)v. 

•' Hchol. ad Luc. Tim. 41-J avocjipas 77 riix4pa\...ri(xav wap' ' E\\r]aii> i]/j.4pai airpa^lav 
darjyoufjLti'ai iravToi Kal dpyiau, as dirufjipdoai IkoXow. iv rai/rais ovbi -npocul-Ktv a.v tU 
Tiva, ovoi KaOdirai f/jiXo^ iirtixiyvvTo <pl\(p, dWd Kal to. iepd dx/"?M'ari(Tra iji' ai'Ton. 
iKaXfiTo oi ravra avroh Kara t'ov '\>ivpov6.pLov /xfjva ore Kal ivi^yi^ov roh KaraxOovioii' 
Kal Trdj oiiTOi 6 fji.rjv dvuTO KUToixo/x^yoi^ fxtrd, crvyvbrriTOi irdvTusv irpoibfTuv Hrfpou 
Tpbirov 8v Kal to, Aidata crvyud^ofrfs -qyov ' AOTjfaloi. 

U. 1 



50 The Anthesteria [ch. 

and cessation of business, and which were called unlucky {airo- 
(f>pd8e'i). On these days no one would accost any one else, and 
friends would positively have no dealings with each other, and 
even sanctuaries were not used. These times were so accounted on 
the analogy of the month of February, when also it was the custom 
to sacrifice to those below, and all that month was dedicated to 
the dead and accompanied by gloom, everything going on in an 
unusual fashion just as the Athenians celebrated the Diasia in 
gloom.' Clearly to the scholiast the Diasia is but one element 
of a month given over to the dead. 

The meaning of Anthesterion, the significance of its ceremonies, 
have been effectively overlaid by the wine-god and his flower 
garlands, but with the Romans there was no such superposition 
and consequently no misunderstanding. They clearly realized two 
things, that February was the month of the dead, and that it was 
the month of purification. Plutarch in his Roman Questions'^ 
asks ' Why was Decimus Brutus wont to sacrifice to the dead 
in December, whereas all other Romans offered libations and sacri- 
fices to the dead in the month of February ? ' In his twenty-fifth 
Question", while discussing the reasons why the days following 
respectively the Calends, Nones and Ides of each month were 
unlucky, he tells us that the Romans ' used to consecrate the first 
month of the year to the Olympian gods, but the second to the 
gods of the earth, and in this second month (February) they were 
wont to practise certain purifications and to sacrifice to the dead.' 
Athenaeus^ states that ' Juba the Mauretanian said that the month 
of February was so called from the terrors of the lower world, with 
regard to means taken for riddance from such alarms at the time 
when the winter is at its height, and it is the custom to offer 
libations to the dead on several days.' Juba the Mauretanian must 
have known quite well that in February the winter was not at its 
height. He states correctly the fact that February was a month 
devoted to ceremonies for the riddance of terrors from the under- 

1 Plut. Q. R. XXXIV. 5ia t'l, tQiv HWwv 'Fufiaiuv ev r<f ^e^povapii^ /J-V'- TfoiovfxAvuv 
Xoas Koi euayiaixovs toIs TedvrjKoai, AeKifMos BpoOros (ws KLKepicf laTopyjKev) ev tw 
A€Kep.j3piqi tout' eirpaTTfv; 

- Plut. Q. R. XXV. TU)v fi7]vu>v TOP fiev trpu)TOi''0\vfXTriois deoh Upwaav rov 8e devrepov 
^dovioL^ ev o5 Kal Kadapp-ovs TLvas reXouai /cat rois KaroLxofjiivoLS evayi^ovffLV . 

•* Athen. iii. 53 p. 98 tov 8e firiva toutov KXrjdTjval (prjcnv 6 'Slavpoaioi 'lo^as dvo tQv 
Karovdaiwv (p6^wv Kar' dvalpeaiv tGjv Seipdriov ev u> tov xet/Au)v6s ecrri rb d.Kp.aibTaTov 
Kal idos TOTS TOts KaTOLXop-ivoLS Ta.% xocts eTTLcpepeiv TroXXats ijfiepai.s. 



n] Tlie Liqyercalia 51 

world, but carelessly adds an impossible reason for the selection of 
this particular month. 

Ovid is of all witnesses the most weighty because his testimony 

is in part unconscious. In the opening words of the second book 

of the Fasti^, after an invocation to Janus, he goes straight to the 

question of what the Romans meant by the word fehruum ; he 

notes that the term was applied to many things, wool, a branch 

from a pine-tree, grain roasted with salt, and finally concludes that 

' any thing by which the soul was purged was called by his rude 

ancestors fehruum! 

'Denique quodcumque est, quo pectora nostra piantiir, 
Hoc apud iutonsos nomen habebat avos.' 

The month he feels sure got its name from these 'februa' or 
purifications, but he asks ' was it because the Luperci purified all 
the soil with the strips of skin and accounted that a purification 
or atonement, or was it because when the dies ferales were accom- 
plished then owing to the fact that the dead were appeased there 
was a season of purity ? ' 

'Mensis ab his dictus secta quia pelle Luperci 

Oinne solum lustrant idque piaruen habent ? 
Aut quia placatis sunt tempora pura sepulcris, 
Tunc ciun ferales praeteriere dies 'i ' 

Both the ceremonials, the Lupercalia and the Feralia, were, 
he knows, cathartic : that Fe(b)rua and Feralia were etymologically 
and significantly the same naturally he does not guess. Still less 
could he conjecture that etymologically February and Anthesterion 
are in substance one. 

The two great February festivals" to which Ovid alludes are of 
course the Feralia and the Lupercalia, celebrated respectively on 
the 21st and loth of February, 

The Feralia was but the climax of a series of days beginning 
on Feb. 13th and devoted to ceremonies of the worship of ancestors, 
Parentalia. It is curious that, though the Lemuria (May 9—13) 
were marked as Nefasti, none of the days of the Parentalia were so 
marked: still from the 13th to the 21st marriages were forbidden, 

1 Ovi.l, Fanti ii. 10. 

- The ceremonies of the Luijeicalia have been fully dlHCUSHed by Wanlc-Fowlor, 
The lloman FestivaU, p. 310, and very fully by Mannhardt, Mytholoi/isclic Fom-h- 
ungeri, p. 72. 

4—2 



52 The Anthesteria [ch. 

temples closed, and magistrates appeared without their insignia ; 
clearly there was some lingering dread of ghosts that might be 
about. Parentalia and Feralia alike were ceremonies wholly 
devoted to the placation of ghosts. 

In the Lupercalia, on the other hand, it is purification rather 
than placation that is the prominent feature in the rites. Much 
in the Lupercalia is obscure, and especially the origin of its name, 
but one ritual element is quite certain. Goats and a dog were 
sacrificed, two youths girt themselves in the skins of the slain 
goats, they held in their hands strips of the hides of the victims. 
They ran round a certain prescribed portion of the city, and as 
they ran smote the women they met with the strips of skin. 
These strips of skin were among the things known as fehrua, 
purifiers, and by their purifying power they became fertility 
charms. 

'Forget not in your speed, Antonius, 
To touch Calpiu-nia, for our elders say 
The barren touched in this holy chase 
Shake off their sterile curse i.' 

There 'has been much needless discussion as to whether in cere- 
monies where striking and beating occur the object is to drive out 
evil spirits or to stimulate the powers of fertility. Primitive man 
does not so narrowly scrutinize and analyse his motives. To strike 
with a sacred thing, whether with a strip of skin from a victim or 
a twig from a holy tree, was to apply what the savage of to-day 
would call ' good medicine.' Precisely how it worked, Avhether by 
expulsion or impulsion, is no business of his. 

When the Catholic makes the sacred sign of the Cross over 
his food, is he, need he be, quite clear as to whether he does it to 
induce good or to exorcise evil ? The peasant mother of to-day 
may beat her boy partly with a view to stirring his dormant moral 
impulses, but it is also, as she is careful to explain, with intent to 
' beat the mischief out of him.' In the third Mime of Herondas^ 
the mother is explicit as to the expulsive virtue of beating. Her 
boy is a gambler and a dunce, so she begs the schoolmaster to 

'Thrash him upon his shoulders till his spirit, 
Bad thing, is left just hovering on his lips.' 

1 Julius Caesar, Act i. Sc. 2, v. 6. 
- Heroud. 2Iim. iii. 3. 



n] The Liipercalia 53 

She is in the usual primitive dilemma : his spirit is bad but 
it is his life ; it is kill and cure. 

The strips of goat-skin were fehrua^, purifying, and thereby 
fertility charms. As such they cast sudden illumination on the 
'magic fleece' already discussed. The animal sacrificed, be it 
sheep or goat or dog, is itself a placation to ghosts or underworld 
powers ; hence its skin becomes of magical effect : the deduction 
is easy, almost inevitable. The primary gist of the sacrifice is to 
appease and hence keep off evil spirits ; it is these evil spirits that 
impair fertility : in a word purification is the placation of ghosts. 

The question ' What was purity to the ancients ?' is thus seen to 
be answered almost before it is asked. Purity was not spiritual purity 
in our sense — that is foreign to any primitive habit of thought, 
nor was it physical purity or cleanliness — it was possible to be 
covered from head to foot with mud and yet be ceremonially pure. 
But so oddly does the cycle of thought come round, that the purity 
of which the ancients knew ivas, though in a widely different sense, 
spiritual purity, i.e. freedom from bad spirits and their maleficent 
influence. To get rid of these spirits was to undergo purification. 
In the month of February and Anthesterion the Roman or Greek 
might, mutatis mutandis, have chanted our Lenten hymn : 

'Christian, dost thou see them 
On the holy gi'ound 
How the hosts of Midian 
Prowl and prowl around ? 
Christian, up and smite them!' 

Till the coming of the new religion of Dionysos, the Greek 
notion of purity seems not to have advanced beyond this negative 
combative attitude, this notion of spiritual forces outside and 
against them. 

The question yet remains 'Why did this. purification need to 
take place in the spring?' The answer is clear. Why did our 
own near ancestors have spring cleanings ? 

'Winter rains and ruins are over 
And all the season of snows and sins,... 
While in green underwood and co\or 
Jilossora by blossom the l^pring begins.' 

' Scrv. ad Verg. Aen. viii. SlU nam pollom ipsam capri voteroH ffhntum. vocabiint. 
Varro (Ling. Lat. vi. 13) says that fch run in wan Kabine ior purgamcntum. 



54 The Antheste7'ia [ch. 

Winter is a reckless time with its Christmas and its Saturnalia. 
There is little for the primitive agriculturist to do and less to 
fear. The fruits of the earth have died down, the gods have done 
their worst. But when the dead earth begins to awake and put 
forth bud and blossom, then the ghosts too have their spring 
time, then is the moment to propitiate the dead below the earth. 
Ghosts were placated that fertility might be promoted, fertility 
of the earth and of man himself. 

It is true that the primitive rites of February and Anthe- 
sterion, of Romans and Greeks, were in the main of ' riddance.' 
The ghosts, it would seem from the ritual of the Choes and Chytroi, 
the chewing of buckthorn, anointing with pitch, the mandate to 
depart, were feared as evil influences to be averted ; but there 
is curious evidence to show that at the time of the Anthesteria 
the coming of the ghosts was regarded as a direct promotion of 
fertility. Athenaeus\ quoting the Commentaries of Hegesander^, 
tells us of a curious tradition among the natives of ApoUonia in 
Chalkis. ' Around Apollonia of Chalkidike there flow two rivers, 
the Ammites and the Olynthiacus and both fall into the lake Bolbe. 
And on the river Olynthiacus stands a monument of Olynthus, 
son of Herakles and Bolbe. And the natives say that in the 
months of Elaphebolion and Anthesterion the river rises because 
Bolbe sends the fish apopyris to Olynthus, and at that season an 
immense shoal of fish passes from the lake to the river Olynthus. 
The river is a shallow one, scarcely overpassing the ankles, but 
nevertheless so great a shoal of the fish arrives that the inhabi- 
tants round about can all of them lay up sufficient store of salt 
fish for their needs. And it is a wonderful fact that they never 
pass by the monument of Olynthus. They say that formerly 
the people of Apollonia used to perform the accustomed rites to 
the dead in the month of Elaphebolion, but now they do them 
in Anthesterion, and that on this account the fish come up in 
those months only in which they are wont to do honour to the 
dead.' Here clearly the dead hero is the source of national 
wealth, the honours done him are the direct impulsion to fertility. 
The gloomy rites of aversion tend to pass over into a cheerful, 
hopeful ceremonial of ' tendance.' 

1 Athen. viii. 11 p. 334 f. 2 35.3 (.gnt. B.C. 



ii] Placation of Ghosts 55 

To resume, the Anthesteria was primarily a Feast of All 
Souls : it later^ became a revel of Dionysos, and at the revel 
men wreathed their cups with flowers, but, save for a vague and 
unscientific et}'mology, we have no particle of evidence that the 
Anthesteria was ever a Feast of Flowers. The transition from 
the revocation of ghosts with its dire association to a drunken 
revel may seem harsh, but human nature is always ready for the 
shift from Fast to Feast, witness our own Good Friday holiday. 

The Ritual of 'EvayiafjioL 

In the light of the ceremonies of the spring month February 
and Anthesterion, it is now possible to advance a step in the 
understanding of Greek ritual terminology and through it of 
Greek religious thought. 

In the first chapter the broad distinction was established 
between sacrifice to the Olympians of the upper air — sacrifice 
which involved communion with the worshipper, and sacrifice to 
chthonic powers which forbade this communion — in which the 
sacrifice was wholly made over to the object of sacrifice. The 
first, the Olympian sacrifice, is expressed by two terms, dvetv and 
lepeveiv; the second, if the sacrifice is burnt, by oXoKavrelv, 
and as will presently be seen by acpd^eiv, also more generally 
by the term ivaji^eiv. 

As regards the Olympian terms, it is only necessary to say 
definitely what has already been implied, that 6veiv strictly is 
applicable only to the portion of the sacrifice that was actually 
burnt with a view to sublimation, that it might reach the gods 
in the upper air; whilst lepeveiv applies rather to the portion 
unburn t, which was sacred indeed, as its name implies, to the 
gods, but was actually eaten in communion by the worshipper. 
With the growing prevalence of burnt sacrifice and the increasing 
popularity of the Olympians and their service, the word 6veiv 
came to cover the whole field of sacrifice, and in late and care- 
less writers is used iov any form of sacrifice burnt or unbuiiit 
without any consciousness of its primary moaning. 

The term lepeveiv is strictly used only of the sacrifice of an 
animal ; lepelov is the animal victim. Among the Homeric Greeks 

• That the religion of Dionysos came to Greece at a comparatively late duto will 
be shown in Chapter viii. 



56 The Anthesteria [ch. 

sacrifice and the flesh feast that followed were so intimately con- 
nected that the one almost implied the other ; the lepelov, the 
animal victim, was the material for the KpeoSaia-La, the flesh feast. 
So prominent in the Homeric mind was the element of feasting 
the worshipper that the feast is sometimes the only stated object. 
Thus Odysseus^ gives command to Telemachus and his thralls : 

'Now get you to my well-built house, the best of all the swine 
Take you aud quickly sacrifice that straightway we may dine.' 

Here the object is the meal, though incidentally sacrifice to 
the gods is implied. It is not that on the occasion of sacrifice 
to the gods man solemnly communicates, but that when man 
would eat his fill of flesh food he piously remembers the gods 
and burns a little of it that it may reach them and incline their 
hearts to beneficence. 

In the Homeric sacrifice there is communion, but not of any 
mystical kind ; there is no question of partaking of the life aud 
body of the god, only of dining with him. Mystical communion 
existed in Greece, but, as will be later seen, it was part of the 
worship of a god quite other than these Homeric Oljanpians, 
the god Dionysos. 

Before we leave the lepelov, the animal sacrificed and eaten, 
one word of caution is necessary. It is sometimes argued that 
animal sacrifice, as contrasted with the simpler offerings of grain 
and fruits, is the mark of a later and more luxurious social state. 
Such was the view of Porphyry- the vegetarian. Flesh-eating and 
flesh sacrifice is to him the mark of a cruel and barbarous licence. 
Such too was the view of Eustathius^ In commenting on the 
ov\o)(^vTai, the barley grain scattered, he says, ' after the offering 
of barley grain came sacrifices and the eating of meat at sacrifices, 
because after the discovery of necessary foods the luxury of a 
meat diet and imported innovations in food were invented.' As a 
generalization this is false to facts ; it depends on the environment 
of a race whether man will first eat vegetable or animal food ; but 
as regards the jDarticular case of the Greeks themselves, the obser- 
vations of Porphyry and Eustathius are broadly true. The primitive 

1 Od. XXIV. 215 

SeLTTVov S' al\j/a crvQv iepevaaTe os ris apiaros. 

2 Porph. de Abst. ii. passim. 

3 Eust. ad II. I. 449 § 132 /nera 8i ras ovXoxvras ai dvaiai Kai i) ev avrals Kpew(payla 
dioTi. Kal /j.€Ta TTjv tQ)v avayKalwv Tpo<f)Wv evpeffiv t) Trjs KpetjjSaicrla^ TroXvriXeia Kal to 
TTJs rpocprjs eweiaaKTOv evptjTai. 



n] Placation of Ghosts 57 

dwellers in Greece and round the Mediterranean generally lived 
mainly on vegetarian diet, diversified by fish, and the custom of 
flesh-eating in large quantities was an innovation brought from 
without^ {iveicraKTov). Athenaeus'^ in his first book discusses the 
various kinds of food, and dwells with constant astonishment on 
the flesh-eating habits of the Achaean heroes of Homer. He 
quotes the comic poet Eubulos as asking 

' I pray you, when did Homer ever make 
An Achaean chief eat fish ? 'tis always flesh, 
And roasted too, not boiled.' 

Achaean chiefs, he notes — and in this they resemble their 
northern descendants — ' do not care for made-dishes, kickshaws 
and the like. Homer sets before them only roast meat, and for 
the most part beef, such as would put life into them, body and 
soul.' It is true Athenaeus is arguing about the simplicity of the 
Homeric as contrasted with later Greek life, but the fact he states 
is beyond dispute, i.e. that the Homeric diet was mainly of flesh 
and unlike the vegetarian and fish diet of the ordinary Greek. 
Given a flesh diet for man, and the sacrifice of flesh to the gods he 
makes in his own image follows. 

The terms 6vecv and lepeveiv belong then to sacrifice regarded 
as a feast; it remains to consider the term ivayl^eiv, in the definition 
of which we come, I think, to the fullest understanding of the 
ideas of the lower stratum of Greek religion. 



'■o 



First it is necessary to establish the fact that in usage the 
terms dveLu and ivayl^eiv are clearly distinguished. A passage iu 
Pausanias is for this purpose of capital importance. Pausanias is 
visiting a sanctuary of Herakles at Sicyon. He makes the follow- 
iDg observations^: 'In the matter of sacrifice they are accustomed 

1 Prof. Ridgeway {Early Arje of Greece, vol. i. p. 524) has shown (to mo 
conclusively) that these Horneric Achiieans were of Celtic origin and brout,'ht 
with them from central Europe the tlesh-roa«((H(7 and flesh-eating habits of their 
northern ancestors. 

■^ Athen. I. 4G p. 25. 

* P. II. 10. 1 irrl 5i rrj Ovaltf. roidde Spav vo/xl^ov<n. ^aiffrov iv ^iKVUi'l(f. \iyoviTiv 
i\Bl}VTa KaraKafidv '\ipaK\d ffcpas ws TJpoj'C ivayifovTas- oijkovv ij^iov dpav ovdiv 6 
4>o?<7ros Twv auTwv, dW W5 OfS Ovuv. koL vvv (ti Q.pva oi '^ikvwvioi cpd^avrfi Kal roi''S 
firfpohs iwl Tou jiujixov Kavaavres ru. /xev i(rOlov(nv ws aTro upelov rd ot (js ripwC twv xptuiv 
iva.yL'<;ov(n. That the distinction between Ovtw and ivayL^tiv is no lat<' invention 
of Pausanias is shown by the fact that Herodotos (ii. 4H) uses the same words and 
draws the same distinction thou(,'h with less exiilicit detail. Speaking of Herakles 
as Kod and hero, he .says : t(Jj jxiv dUavdri^ 'U\t'/U7ri(^ U iTrwvvixLr}v Ouovai, ti^ S' iripi^ 
ws i/)pw'C ivayi^ovai. 



68 The Anthesteria [ch. 

to do as follows. They say that Phaestos, when he came to 
Sicyon, found the Sicyonians devoting offerings to Heracles as to 
a hero. But Phaestos would do nothing of the kind, but would 
sacrifice to him as to a god. And even now the Sicyonians, when 
they slay a lamb and burn the thighs upon the altar, eat a portion 
of the flesh as though it were a sacrificial victim, and another part 
of the flesh they make over as to a hero.' The passage is not 
easy to translate, because we have no English equivalent for 
evayi^etv. I have translated the word by ' devote ' because it 
connotes entire dedication — part of the sacrifice is shared, eaten 
by the worshipper in common with Heracles regarded as a god, the 
other part is utterly consecrated to Heracles as a hero ; it is dead 
men's food. Pausanias, who is often careless in his use of Oveiv, 
here carefully marks the distinction. The victim is an animal : 
part of it is offered to an Olympian — that portion is shared ; part 
of it is offered, like the offerings at the Chytroi, to no Olympian, 
but to a ghost, and of that portion no man eats. 

A second passage from Pausanias adds a further element of 
differentiation. At Megalopolis, Pausanias visited a sanctuary of 
the Eumenides. Of their ritual he speaks as follows^ : ' They say 
that when these goddesses would drive Orestes mad they appeared 
to him black, but that after he had bitten off his finger they 
seemed to him white, and his senses returned to him, and there- 
fore he made over an offering to the black goddesses to turn away 
their wrath, but to the white ones he did sacrifice.' 

Language and ritual could scarcely speak more plainly : Ovetv 
is to the Olympians, a joyous thanksgiving to gods who are all 
white and bright, beneficent, of the upper air ; ivajL^etv is to those 
below, who are black and bad and malignant : Oveiv is for Oepairela, 
tendance ; ivajiS^eiv for dirorpoirr], riddance. 

The distinction between the two forms of ritual having been 
thus definitely established, it remains to examine more closely the 
word iva'y'it^etv ?ind the ritual it expresses, that of the dead — a ritual 
which, it must at this point be remembered, is also concerned 
with purification. 

The word ivayt^ecv can only mean the making of or dealing 

^ P. VIII. 34. 3 Kai ovTOj rats /xei> (ratj /xeXalfai-s) ivj^yiaev, airoTpiwuv rb fi-qvifia 
olvtCiv, ratj 5^ idvije rats \evKais. 



n] Placation of Ghosts 59 

with something that is of the nature of an ayo?, or, as the word 
sometimes appears, a ayo'^. It did not escape that acute observer 
of man and his language, Archbishop Eustathius^ that this word 
and its cognate ayto^, holy, had in ancient days a double 
significance, that holy was not only pure but also polluted ; this, 
he says, 'is on account of the double meaning of ayo<;.' To put 
the matter into modern phraseology, ^709 is the thing that is 
taboo, the thing consecrated to the gods, and hence forbidden to 
man, the thing 'devoted.' The word lies deep down in the ritual 
of ancient sacrifice and of ancient religious thought ; it is the 
very antithesis of communion ; it is tinged with, though not quite 
the equivalent of, expiation. 

Fortunately we are not left to conjecture as to what was the 
precise nature of the ceremonies covered by the word evayi^eiv. 
We know what was done, though we have no English word fully 
to express that doing. This fact may well remind us that we have 
lost not only the word but the thought, and must be at some pains 
to recover it. In the discussion that follows no translation of 
ivayi^etv will be attempted : I shall frankly use the Greek word 
and thereby avoid all danger from misleading modern conno- 
tations-. 

Quite accidentally, in the middle of a discourse on the various 
sorts of soap and washing basins, Athenaeus* has preserved for us 
a record of the exact ritual of evayLafxoi. After stating that the 
word dTTovLiTTpov, Washing off, is applied alike to the water in 
which either feet or hands are washed, he goes on to note that the 



^ Eiist. ad II. XXIII. 429, 1357. 59 ovtu koL dyios wapa. toTs iraXaiolt ou fxdvov 6 
Kadapos dXXct Kal 6 /j.iapo'S 5ia t6 toO ayovs SnrXdarjfiov. 

- I do not deny that the word can be translated if we are content to vary our 
rendering in each various case. In the passages already discussed ' devote ' is 
perhaps a fair equivalent, because the contrast emphasized is with a sacrifice 
shared. Sometimes the word may be rendered simply ' sacrifice to the dead ', 
sometimes 'purificatory sacrifice', sometimes ' expiatory sacrifice '. No one word 
covers the whole field. It is this lost union of many diverse elements that has 
to be recovered and is nameless. 

* Athen. ix. 78 p. 409 k ff. iolui 5e KoXeTrai Trap' 'AO-nvalois airbvinfia, iirl TWf e/s 
Tifxr)t> Toh vfKpols yivofjAvdiv Kal (ttI tQ)v tov% ivayth KaOaipbvTO}!' ws koL K.\el5i)ixo^ iv rip 
(TTiypaipo/j.^vifi 'E^T)yr]TiK(p. UpoOdi yap irepl (vayKT/xQv ypd(f>(i rdSe' '^' Opv^ai j^idOvvoi' 
irp6% eawipav toO (T-qp-aTos. "ETreira irapa t'ov jidOvvov Trpbs ianipav /SX^we, u5wp Kardxffi 
Xiyuv rdde- ''Tjmv d.Trdvi/j.fia oh XPV '<'''' "^^ OifXLS.' "ETretra avOis p.vpov Kard-xtf-' 
Uap^Oero raOra Kal Awp69eos (pdaKwv Kal iv rois EvwaTptoQv waTpiois rdSe yeypd<pdai 
Vfpi Trj^ Twf lKfTu>v KaOdpfff.oji. "Ewei.T' dirovi.xpdp.tvo'i avrbs Kal ol dWoi ol ffTr\ayxi'i'''oi'Tei, 
IJouip \afiu)if KdOaipf dir6vi^c rb alp.a toO KaOaipo/xivov Kal fj-erd rb dirbi'ififia dvaKiv^aa^ 
fli ravTo iyx^^- 



60 The Antliesteria [ch. 

word dirovift/xa, *offscouring/ slightly different in form but sub- 
stantially the same in meaning, has among the Athenians a technical 
ritual usage. ' The term airovLfx^a is specially applied to the 
cerevionies in honour of the dead and to those that take place in the 
purification of the polluted.' The word translated ' polluted ' is 
evayeU, i.e. under or in a state of <Z709. He then proceeds to quote 
from a lost treatise on ceremonies of eva'yi(Tfi6<;, the exact details 
of the ritual. ' Kleidemos, in his treatise called Exegeticus, writes 
on the subject of iva^icrfiol as follows : " Dig a trench to the west 
of the tomb. Then, look along the trench towards the west, pour 
down water, saying these words : A purification for you to whom it 
is meet and right. Next pour down a second time myrrh." 
Dorotheos adds these particulars, alleging that the following 
prescription is written also in the ancestral rites of the Eupatridae 
concerning the purification of suppliants : " Next having washed 
himself, and the others who had disembowelled the victim having 
done the same, let him take water and make purification and 
wash off the blood from the suppliant who is being purified, 
and afterwards, having stirred up the washing, pour it into the 
same place ".' 

The conjoint testimony of the two writers is abundantly clear: 
either alone would have left us in doubt as to the real gist of the 
ceremony. Kleidemos tells us that it was addressed to the dead ; 
the trench near the tomb, the western aspect of the setting sun, 
the cautious formulary, 'To you to whom it is meet and right,' all 
tell the same tale. It is safest not even to name the dead, lest 
you stir their swift wrath. But Kleidemos leaves us in the dark 
as to why they want an airovi^nia, 'an offscouring,' water defiled : 
why will not pure water or water and myrrh suffice ? Dorotheos 
supplies the clue — those who have slain the victim wash the blood 
from their hands and wash it off him who has been purified, and 
then stuTing it all up pour it into the trench. The ghost below 
demands the blood of the victim washed off from the polluted 
suppliant: when the ghost has drunk of this, then, and not till 
then, there is placation and purification. 

That the ghost should demand the blood of the victim is 
natural enough; the ghosts in the Nekuia of the Odyssey 'drink 
the black blood' and thereby renew their life ; but in ceremonies of 
purification they demand polluted water, the ' offscourings,' and 



n] Placation of Gliosis 61 

why? The reason is clear. The victim is a surrogate for the 
poHuted suppliant, the blood is put upon him that he may be 
identified with the victim, the ghost is deceived and placated. 
The ghost demands blood, not to satisfy a physical bvit so to speak 
a spiritual thirst, the thirst for vengeance. This thirst can only 
be quenched by the water polluted, the 'offscourings'^ of the 
suppliant. 

The suppliant for purification in the ritual just described was 
identified with the victim, or rather perhaps we should say the 
victim with the suppliant, by pouring over the suppliant the 
victim's blood. There were other means of identification. It has 
already been seen (p. 27) that the suppliant sometimes put on the 
whole skin of the victim, sometimes merely stood with his foot on 
the fleece. Another and more attenuated form of identification was 
the wearing of fillets, i.e. strands of wool confined at intervals by 
knots to make them stronger. Such fillets were normally worn by 
suppliants and by seers : the symbolism for suppliants is obvious, 
for seers evident on a closer inspection. The seer himself was 
powerless, but he could by the offering of a sacrifice to ghosts or 
heroes invoke the mantic dead ; he wears the symbols of this 
sacrifice, the wreath and the fillets. Later their significance was 
foigotten, and they became mere symbols of office. The omphalos 
at Delphi, itself a mantic tomb, was covered with a net-work of 
wool-fillets, renowned no doubt at first with the offering of each 
new victim, later copied in stone-, but always the symbol of 
recurring sacrifice. 

The dread ceremonial of tvajLo-fxo^ in its crudest, most 
barbarous form, is very clearly shown on the vase-painting in 
fig. 8, from a ' Tyrrhenian ' amphora now in the British 
Museum^ The scene depicted is the sacrifice of Polyxena on the 
tomb of Achilles. In the Hecuba of Euripides*, Neoptolemos 
takes Polyxena by the hand and leads her to the top of the 



' Hesych. Xovrpdf to pijirapov vSup -fiyow d7r6»'tAt/ita. 

- Bull, de Corr. Hell. xxiv. p. 258. 

3 Published by Mr H. B. Waltois, J. U.S. xviii. 1898, p. 281, pi. xv. The class 
of vases known sonietinios as 'Tyrrhenian,' soniL'times as Corintho-Attic, all bilon^ 
to the same period, about the middle of the sixth century ii.c, and are apparently 
from tlie same workshop. 

* Eur. Hec. 535. 



62 



The Anthesteria 



[CH. 



mound, pours libations to his father, praying him to accept the 
'soothing draughts,' and then cries 

'Come thou and drink the maiden's blood 
Black and unmixed.' 

In the centre of the design in fig. 8 is the omphalos-shaped 
graved which is in fact the altar. Right over it the sacrifice takes 




Fig. 8. 

place. Neoptolemos, as next of kin to the slain man, is the 
sacrificer; Polyxena, as next of kin to the slayer, is the sacrifice. 
The ghost of the slain man drinks her blood and is appeased, and 
thereby the army is purged. « 

The blood only is offered to the ghost — the blood is the life, 
and it is vengeance, not food, the ghost cries for. It is so with the 
Erinyes, who are but angry ghosts-; when they hunt Orestes they 
cry^ 

'The smell of human blood smiles wooingly.' 

Earth polluted has drunk a mother's blood, and they in turn 

'Will gulp the living gore red from his limbs*.' 

When the ghost of Achilles has drunk the fresh blood of the 
maiden her body will be burnt, not that it may rise as a sweet 
savour to the gods above, but as a holocaust ; it is a 6vaia 

1 Omphalos and tomb are in intent the same, see J.H.S. xix. p. 225. 

- The genesis of the Erinys is discussed later, in Chapter v. 

3 Aesch. Eum. 253. 4 Aesch. Eum. 264. 



n] Placatioti of Ghosts 63 

aSatTo?, a sacrifice without feast. It will be burnt on the low- 
lying eschara or portable hearth that stands on the grave. The 
eschara was by the ancients clearly distinguished from the altar 
proper, the /3&)/Lio?. The eschara, sa3's the scholiast on the 
Fhoenissae^ of Euripides, is 'accurately speaking the trench in the 
earth where they offer epayia-fioi to those who are gone below; the 
altar is that on which they sacrifice to the heavenly gods.' 

Porphyry-, who is learned in ritual matters, draws the same 
distinction. ' To the Olympian gods they set up temples and 
shrines and altars, but to the Earth-gods and to heroes, escharas, 
while for those below the earth there are trenches and megara.' 

It is on an eschara that Clytaemuestra does her infernal service 
to the Erinyes^ She cries to them in bitter reproach : 

' How oft have ye from out my hands licked up 
Wineless hbations, sober offerings, 
And on the hearth of fire banquets grim 
By night, an hour unshared of any god ! ' 

Her ritual was the ritual of the underworld abhorred of the 
Olympians. 

The eschara on which the holocaust to the underworld gods is 
burnt lies low upon the ground ; the ySw/xo?, the altar of the 
Olympians, rises higher and higher heavenwards. There is the 
like symbolism in the actual manner of the slaying of the victim, 
Eustathius^ in commenting on the sacrifice of Chryses to Phoebus 
Apollo, when they 'drew back the victims' heads,' says 'according 
to the custom of the Greeks, for if they are sacrificing to those 
above they bend back the neck of the sacrificial animal so that it 
may look away towards the sky, but if to heroes or to the dead in 
general the victim is sacrificed looking downwards.' Eustathius" 
again says of the prayer of Achilles, 'by looking heavenwards he 
expresses vividly whither the prayer is directed, for Achilles is not 
praying to Zeus of the underworld, but to Zeus of the sky.' The 
Christian of to-day, though he believes his God is everywhere, yet 

' Sehol. ad Eur. Plioen. 284 oi.a(pipti ftwfibi Kal iaxo-po- ad 274 ^(Txdpa A"?*' Kvplws 
6 inl Tr}"! yrjs ^oBpoi ivOa ivayl^ovcri roh koltw ^pxon^fOLi, (iui/xoi 5i ii> ifi Ovovai roh 
iwovpavloi.'i Otoh. 

* I'orpli. f/c aiitr. mimjili. ■{ TOis ixtv ^O\v/j.iriots deots vaovi re Kal ^drj Kal ^w/iovi 
IbpvaavTo, xOovioLi oi Kal rjpoKxiv iax^pai, viroxOovioii 5i ^6dpovi Kal /xiyapa. Tlio 
megara will be diHCUHsed lati.T (p. 125). 

* AeHch. Eum. 10(5. 

* EuBtath. ad IL i. 4r,<) § 134. ' Eustath. § 10r,7, 37. 



64 The Antheste7'ia [ch. 

uplifts his hands to pray. For the like reason the victim for the 
dead was black and that for the Olympians frequently white ; that 
for the dead sacrificed at the setting of the sun, that for the 
Ouranians at the dawn\ Upon certain holocausts, as has already 
been seen, the sun might not look. 

The ritual of the €va<yta/u,oi is then of 'purgation hy placation 
of the spirits of the underworld. The extreme need of primitive 
man for placation is from the stain of bloodshed ; purgation from 
this stain is at first only obtained by the offering of the blood of 
the murderer himself, then by the blood of a surrogate victim 
applied to him. 

It is, I think, probable that at the back of many a mytho- 
logical legend that seems to us to contain what we call 'human 
sacrifice' there lies, not the slaying of a victim for the pleasure of 
a Moloch-like god, but simply the appeasement of an angry ghost. 
So long as primitive man preserves the custom of the blood-feud, 
so long will he credit his dead kinsman with passions like his 
own. 

In this connection it is interesting to note some further details 
of the ritual terminology of evajia-fioL as contrasted with that of 
the service of the Olympians. 

The sacrifice burnt that the Olympians may eat of it is dv^ia, 
the thing burned to smoke ; the sacrificial victim slain to be eaten 
by the worshipper is lepelov, the holy thing ; the victim slain for 
placation and purification is by correct authors called by another 
name, it is a acj^djcov, a thing slaughtered. The word explains 
itself: it is not the sacrifice burnt, not the sacred thing killed 
and carved for a meal, but simply the victim hacked and hewn to 
pieces. Such a victim was not even necessarily skinned. Of what 
use to carefully flay a thing doomed to utter destruction ? In the 
Electra of Euripides'- the old man describes such a a^dyiov : 

'I saw upon the pyre with its black fleece 
A sheep, the victim, and fresh blood outpoured.' 

It is interesting to note in this connection that the word 
a(f)djiov is always used of human victims, and of such animals as 

1 Schol. ad Apoll. Ebotl. i. 587 toIs fxkv ovv Karoixofiivois wy irepl rjKlov dvcr/ias 
ivayi^ovai tols de ovpavLoais virb Tr]i> ew, dvareWovTos tov ijXiov. 

2 Eur. El. 514. 



ii] Placation of Gliosis 65 

were in use as surrogates. The term is applied to all the famous 
maiden-sacrifices of mythology. lon^ asks Creousa: 

'And did thy father sacrifice thy sisters?' 

And Creousa with greater ritual precision makes answer : 

' He dared to slay them as sphagia for the laud.' 

As a a(f)d<yLov Polyxena'- is slain on the tomb of Achilles ; she 
dies as an atonement, a propitiation, as ' medicine of salvation.' 

The normal and most frequent use of acjidyia was, as in the 
case of ivajiafjLOi in general, for purification by placation. In 
stress of great emergency, of pestilence, of famine, and throughout 
historical times at the moment before a battle, a(f>ayia were 
regularly offered. They seem to have been carried round or 
through the person or object to be purified. Athenaeus'* records 
an instructive instance. The inhabitants of Kynaetho, a village in 
Arcadia, neglected the civilizing influences of dancing and feasting, 
and became so savage and impious that they never met except for 
the purpose of quarrelling. They perpetrated at one time a great 
massacre, and after this, whenever their emissaries came to any 
other of the Arcadian cities, the citizens by public proclamation 
bade them depart, and the Mantineans after their departure made 
a purification of the city, ' leading the slaughtered victims round 
the whole circuit of the district.' 

As purifications the use of acfxiyta needs no further comment. 
It is less obvious at first why acfxiyia were always employed in the 
taking of oaths. The expression refiveiv at^dyia is the equivalent 
of the familiar re/xveiv opKia. In the Supplicmts of Euripides'* 
Athene says to Theseus : 

' Hearken whereinto thou must cut the sphagia.' 

She then bids him write the oaths in the hollow of a tripod- 
cauldron and afterwards cut the throats of the victims into the 
cauldj-oii, thus clearly identifying the oaths and the blood. 

1 Eur. Ion 277 

]il. irarrip 'Epfx^'"^' '^^^ ^Oi'cre avy-Ydfovi; 

K I'. irXri TTfiit yaias a(pdyi,a irapOivovi Kravttv. 
^ Eur. Ilec. 121 Tv/xfiifj c(jj6.yi.ov. 

3 Athen. xiv. 22, p. 620 KaUapfibf tyjs 7r6\ews liroiriaavTo (T<f)dyia irepidyovrti KvuXifi 
rrji xwpas cnrdaris. 

* Eur. Supjj. I'l'M) iv ((5 Oi r^ixvtiv crtfjdyia XPV <^' &kov^ fxov. 

H. 5 



66 The Anthesteria [ch. 

In the ordinary ritual of the taking of oaths, the oath-taker 
actually stood upon the pieces of the slaughtered animal. Pausanias\ 
on the road between Sparta and Arcadia, came to a place called 
' Horse's Tomb.' There Tyndareus sacrificed a horse and made 
Helen's suitors take an oath, causing them to stand on the cut-up 
pieces of the horse, — having made them take the oath, he buried the 
horse. At Stenyclerum- in Messenia was another monument, called 
' Boar's Monument,' where it was said Herakles had given an oath 
to the sons of Neleus on the cut pieces of a boar. Nor is the 
custom of swearing on the cut pieces recorded only by mythology. 
In the Bouleuterion at Elis was an image of Zeus, ' of all others,' 
says Pausanias^, ' best fitted to strike terror into evildoers.' Its 
surname was Horkios, He of the Oath. Near this image the 
athletes, their fathers, brothers, and trainers had to swear on the 
cut pieces of a boar that they would be guilty of no foul play as 
regarded the Olympian games. Pausanias regrets that he ' forgot 
to ask what they did with the boar after the oath had been taken 
by the athletes.' He adds, ' With the men of old days the rule was 
as regards a sacrificial animal on which an oath had been taken 
that it should be no more accounted as eatable for men. Homer,' 
he says, 'shows this clearly, for the boar on the cut pieces of which 
Agamemnon swore that Briseis had not been partner of his bed is 
represented as being cast by the herald into the sea: 

" He spake and with the pitiless bronze he cut 
The boar's throat, and the boar Talthybios whirled, 
And in the great wash of the hoary sea 
He cast it to the fish for food*." 

This in ancient days was their custom about such matters.' 

The custom of standing on the fragments of the victim points 
clearly to the identification of oath-taker and sacrifice. The victim 

1 P. III. 20. 9. 2 p. IV. 15. 3. 

3 P. V. 24. 10 To:s 76 dpxo.i-OTipois eirl iepeiuj rjv KadeaTTjKos e^' u ti$ opKiov eTroLrjaaro 
fXTlde eduiSifiov elvai tovt^ '^tl audpuiirij}. Strictly speaking Pausanias ought to have 
written eirl acpayiui, but his meaning is sufficiently clear. r6/j.ia are actually cr(pdyia, 
not iepela. Eustathius, in discussing the sacrifice of Odysseus to the ghosts in the 
Nekuia, makes the following statement : 6ti 'O/xTjpov eiwduTos iep-^ia ra iv "Aidov 
ff(f)dyLa (ttI xotJ veKpQv (pacrlv ol iroKaiol ovk opdiZ-s dprjcrdai tovto, eTri yap viKpwv Topiid 
(paai. Kai ^vro/j-a, iirl Se ffeQv iepeia. Pausanias in the passage cited above (in. 20. 9) 
uses dueiv where acpayid^ecrdai would be more correct. He makes a sort of climax 
of confusion when, in describing the ritual of the hero Amphiaraos, he says 
(i. 34. 5) : iffrl 5e Kaddpcriov tQ 6e<2 6veiv, when he should have said t(J3 rjpwi. 
C'(payid^€cr6ai. 

^ II. XIX. 265. 



n] Placation of Ghosts 67 

was hewn in bits; so if the oath-taker perjure himself will he be 
hewn in bits : the victim is not eaten but made away with, utterly 
destroyed, devoted ; a like fate awaits the oath-breaker : the oath 
becomes in deadly earnest a form of self-imprecation. 

Still less obvious is it why sacrifices to the winds should 
uniformly have taken the form of a(})ayLa rather than lepela. At 
first sight the winds would appear to be if anything Ouranian 
powers of the upper air, yet it seems that sacrifices to the winds 
were buried, not burnt. 

What astonished Pausanias^ more than anything else he saw 

at Methana in Troezen was a ceremony for averting the winds. 

'A wind called Lips, which rushes down from the Saronic gulf, 

dries up the tender shoots of the vine. When the squall is upon 

them two men take a cock, which must have all its feathers white, 

tear it in two, and run round the vines in opposite directions, each 

of them carrying one half of the cock. When they come back to 

the place they start from they bury the cock there. This is the 

device they have invented for counteracting Lips. I myself,' 

he adds, ' have seen the people keeping off hail by sacrifices and 

incantations.' The Methanian cock is a typical a(}>dyiov : it is 

carried round for purification, the evil influences of the wind are 

somehow caught by it, in rather proleptic fashion, and then buried 

away. It is really of the order of pharmakos ceremonies, to be 

considered later, rather than a sacrifice proper. For a a-^dyiov 

we should expect the cock to be black, but on the principle of 

sympathetic magic it is in this case white. The normal sacrifice 

to a wind was a black animal. When in the Frogs'- a storm is 

brewing between Aeschylus and Euripides, and threatens to burst, 

Dionysos calls out : 

' Bring out a ewe, Itoy-s, bring a black-fleccetl ewe, 
Here's a typhoon that's just about to burst.' 

Winds were underworld gods, but when propitious they had 

a strong and natural tendency to become Ouranian, and the white 

sacrifices with intent to compel their beneficence would help this 

out. They are an exact parallel to the black and white Eumenides 

already noted. Virgil'' says : 

'To Storm a black sheep, wliito to tlic favouring West.' 

' I', n. .34. 3. =* Ar. linn. 817. ^ Virg. Aen. m. 120. 

O til 



68 The Anthesteria [ch. 

Equally instructive is the account given by Pausanias^ of the 
ceremonies performed at Titane to soothe the winds, though with 
his customary vagueness Pausanias describes them by the word 
Oveiv when they are really ivayiafioL. They are performed on one 
night in each year, and Pausanias adds, the priest also ' does secret 
ceremonies into four pits,' soothing the fury of the winds, and he 
chants over them, as they say, Medea's charms. Each of the four 
winds dwelt, it is clear, as a chthonic power, in a pit ; his sacrifice 
was after the fashion of heroes and ghosts. It is possible, indeed 
probable, that the pits were in connection with the tomb of some 
hero or heroine. The sacrifice of Iphigeneia was iravo-dvefMos", 
with power to stay the winds ; that of Polyxena at the tomb 
of Achilles had the like virtue. Be that as it may, it will 
be seen when we come to demonology that the winds were 
regarded as ghosts, as breaths : as such their cult was necessarily 
chthonic. 

Another of their functions (n^dyia share with the ordinary 
animal-sacrifices, the lepeia. Like the iepela they could be used 
for purposes of divination. Used as they were for purification in 
any great emergency, mere economy may have suggested that they 
should be further utilized for oracular purposes. The greater 
solemnity of (T^d<yLa would lend to the omens taken from them 
a specially portentous virtue ^ It is amusing to find that even 
Porphyry ^ averse though he is to human sacrifice, still seems to 
feel a dim possibility that for mantic purposes human entrails may 
have special virtue. 'But it will be urged,' he says, as though 
stating a possible and reasonable argument, ' that the future may 
be more clearly divined from the vitals of a man.' 

Precise authors who know about ritual always distinguish 
between the omens taken from ordinary animal sacrifice and 
those from a(})dyta. Thus Xenophon^ in the Anabasis says, 'The 
sacrifices (Iepela) are propitious to ixs, the omens favourable, the 
(T(f)dyia most propitious.' The practice of using a(f)dryia for omens 

1 P. n. 12. 1. 

2 Aesch. Agam. 214. 

3 The full aud somewhat revolting details as to how omens were taken from 
acpdyia do not concern us here; they are given in full by the scholiast on Eur. 
Fhoenissae 1255; see P. Stengel, Hermes, 1899, xxxiv. p. 642. 

■* Porph. de Abst. ii. 51. 
^ Xen. Anub. vi. 5. 21. 



ii] Placation of Ghosts 69 

before a battle would seem to have been uniform. When women, 
says Eteocles^ are wailing and making a commotion, it is the part 
of men 

'To slay the victims, take therefrom the omens 
Before the gods, at the onset of the foe.' 

It is probably to this oracular function of (r<pdyia that we 
owe the very frequent use of the middle acfiayLa^ea-Oai, as in the 
parallel case of dveiv, the sacrifice by fire. For dveiv and dueadai 
the distinction is familiar, and expressly stated by Ammonius"-^: 
* of those who simply sacrifice (active) the victims the word dvovai 
is used, of those who take omens from the entrails dvovTai.' The 
active is of the nature of thanksgiving, the middle partakes of 
prayer and impulsion. In the case of acjiciyia the active is very 
rarely in use, and naturally, for the saci'ifice of acpnjLa has in it 
no element of thanksgiving^ 

The ritual then of cr<^ayia and of ivayLafMol, of slaughter 
and of purification, is based on the fear of ghosts, of ghosts 
and their action on living men, whether as evil winds, or for 
dread portents, or for vengeance on the broken oath, or, first and 
foremost, for the guilt of shed blood. Its essence is of dTrorpoTn], 
aversion. 

Nowhere perhaps is this instinct of aversion so clearly seen, seen 
in a form where the instinct has not yet chilled and crystallized 
into definite ritual, as in the account of the murder of Absyrtos 
by Jason and Medea as given by Apollonius Rhodius^ The nuuder 
was by a treacherous ambuscade set for Absyrtos at the threshold 

' Aesch. Sept. 230 

avopdiv rdS' iffrl a^dyia Kal XPV<^''"^P'-''- 
Oeoicnv ipbeiv woXeixiuv TreipuifM^vwi'. 

2 Ammon. p. 72 Valck. dvovffi fiiv yap oi a<pd^ouTfi to. lepeia, diovrai 5i o£ bib. twv 
aTrKi.yx"'^^ fJMVT€vouTai. 

■'■ The question of ff<pdyia has been very fully discussed by Dr Paul Stengel in 
four papers as follows: ' -^(pdyia,' Hrrmcn, 188(5, xxi. p. 307; ' Misccllon,' xxv. 
p. 321; ' Prophezciung aus dor Z(l}dyia,' xxxi. p. 47!) nnd xxxiv. p. ()-l2. To 
this must be added papers by the same author on ivHfiveiu fvTOfxa in the Zritsrhnjt 
fiir fiijmnmud-Wesrn, 1880, p. 743, and in the Jahrhttch Jiir Philologie, 1882, 
p. 322, and 1883, p. 375, and on the winds, Hcnnen, I'M), p. ()20. I owe much 
in the matter of references to Dr Stcnuel's full collection of sources, but Ins 
conclusions as stated in 'Die SakralaltfrtiiTii.T' (Iwiin Miiiler's Hitiidhurh drr lil. 
AltertuimwiKHemchaft, IJand v. Aht. 3) seem to me to be vitiated by the assumption 
that ceremonies of purification are late and foreign importations. 

* ApoU. Khod. IV. 470, trans, by Mr Gilbert Murray. 



70 The Anthesteria [ch. 

of the temple of Artemis; Jason smites him like a bull for 
sacrifice, while Medea stands by. 

' So by that portal old kneeling he fell, 
And while the last of life yet sobbed and passed, 
Craving, clasped both hands to the wound, to hold 
The dark blood back. But the blood reached, and sprang, 
And, where the veiled woman shuddered from him, 
Lay red on the white robe and the white veil. 
Then swift a sidelong eye, a pitiless eye. 
The Erinys all subduing, that knoweth Sin, 
Awoke, and saw what manner of deed was there. 
And Aeson's son smote from that sacrifice 
Red ravine, and three times ravined with his moiith 
Amid the blood, and three times from him spewed 
That horror of sin ; as men that slay by guile 
Use, to make still the raging of the dead.' 

Apollonius tries to make a ritual of the awful instinct of 
physical fear. The body is mangled that the angry ghost may be 
maimed, the blood actually licked up that the murderer may spit 
it forth and rid himself of the fell pollution. Only then can the 
corpse be safely buried \ But it is too late, for Absyrtos has put 
the blood upon Medea. 

Clytaemnestra, when she murdered Agamemnon, followed the 

same horrid practice of 'aversion.' Sophocles- makes Electra 

say: 

'She lopped his limbs as though he were a foe 
And for libations wiped upon his head 
The blood stains.' 

By the time of Apollonius the Erinys is no longer the actual 
ghost but a separate spirit of vengeance, and even the primitive 
ritual of aversion is explained as a sort of tendance ; the lopped 
limbs are e^dpy/xaTa, first beginnings, a sort of hideous sacrifice to 
the murdered man rather than mainly the means of maiming 

1 Since the above was written my attention has been called to Dr J. G. Frazer's 
paper ' On certain Burial Customs as illustrations of the primitive theory of the soul' 
[Journal of Anthrojjological Institute, vol. xv. 1885 — 6). After a detailed examination 
of the burial rites and customs of the Greeks and many other peoples Dr Frazer 
reaches the following memorable and to me most welcome conclusion : ' In general 
I think we may lay down the rule that wherever we find so-called purification by 
fire or water from pollution contracted by contact with the dead we may assume 
with much probability that the original intention was to place a physical barrier of 
fire or water between the living and the dead, and that the conceptions of iDollution 
and purification are merely the fictions of a later age invented to explain the 
purpose of a ceremony of which the original intention was forgotten.' 

2 Soph. El. 445. 



ii] Placation of Ghosts 71 

him\ But the scholiast^ on the Electra clearly explains the gist 
of the ceremonial. He says these things were done 'as taking 
away the force of the dead so that later they may suffer nothino- 
fearful from them.' 

It may perhaps be felt that such instances are purely mytho- 
logical, and that fear of the ghost had wholly waned in historical 
times. The horrid practice of mutilation no doubt fell into 
abeyance, but the fear of the ghost and the sense that purification 
from gailt could only be obtained by direct appeal to the ghost 
itself lived on. 

The case of Pausanias gives curious evidence as to the 
procedure of an educated murderer of the fifth century B.C. 
Pausanias^ the traveller tells how his namesake sought protection 
from the Goddess of the Brazen House, but failed because he 
was defiled by blood. This pollution he tried by every possible 
means to expiate : he had recourse to purifications of all kinds, he 
made supplication to Zeus Phyxios, a being obviously akin to 
Meilichios — and he resorted to the Psychagogi, the Ghost-Com- 
pellers of Phigalia. They seem to have failed, for Plutarch^ tells 
us he sent to Italy for experts, and they, after they had done 
sacrifice, wrenched the ghost out of the sanctuary. 

The historical case of Pausanias is exactly parallel to that of 
the mythological Orestes. Man expects that the dead man will 
behave as he would behave were he yet living — pursue him for 
vengeance ; the ghost is an actual, almost physical reality. It 
needed a Euripides to see that this ghost was a purely subjective 
horror, a disordered conscience. He makes Menelaos ask the mad 
Orestes'^: 

'What dost thou suffer? What disease undoes thee?' 

and Orestes makes answer : 

' Conscience, for I am conscious of fell deeds.' 

' The details described by Suidas s.v. d/j.a<rxa\i(T0r) have a somewhat apocryphal 
air and are probably due to etymology. 
'■' Schol. ad Soph. Kl. 44.5. 
3 P. III. 17. 7. 

■• Plut. de ser. num. vitid. xvii. /xfraTre/i^^^crej ol \pvxo-'y^o^ fai Ovcavre^ iirfcr-ird- 
ffavro Tov iipoO to ttouXov. 
» Eur. Or. .S!).^ 

ME. tI xpVfJ-^ irdaxiis; tIs <t' air6\\v(Ti,v v6<tos ; 
OF. i] fiVeo'is, 6ri ffvvoioa Sflf' elpyafffji^voi. 



72 The Anthesteria [ch. 

Anthropomorphism is usually regarded as a humane trait in 
Greek religion ; it is noted as a thing distinguishing their cultus 
from the animal worship of less civilized nations. But anthropo- 
morphism, as is clearly seen in ghost-worship, looks both ways. 
To be human is not necessarily to be humane. Man is cruel and 
implacable, and he makes the ghost after his own image. Man is 
also foolish and easily tricked, so he plays tricks upon the vengeful 
ghost, cheating him of his real meed of the murderer's or kinsman's 
blood. Hence the surrogate victims, hence the frequent substitu- 
tion stories. Another element enters in. The gods, and specially 
the ghost-gods, are conservative ; man gets in advance of the gods 
he has made, and is ashamed of the rites he once performed with 
complete confidence in their Tightness. Then he tries by a cheat 
to reconcile his new view and his old custom. Religion, which once 
inspired the best in him, lags behind, expressing the worst. 

Suidas^ tells a story which curiously expresses this state of 
transition, this cheating of the god to save the conscience of the 
worshipper. The Greeks had a proverb, "E/a/Sa/oo? et/x-i, ' I am 
Embaros,' which they used, according to Suidas, of a ' sharp man 
with his wits about him,' and, according to one of the collectors of 
proverbs, of those who ' gave a false impression, i.e. were out of 
their minds.' The origin of the proverb was as follows : There 
was a sanctuary of Artemis at Munychia. A bear came into it 
and was killed by the Athenians. A famine followed, and the god 
gave an oracle that the famine should cease if some one would 
sacrifice his daughter to the goddess. Embaros was the only man 
who promised to do it, on condition that he and his family should 
have the priesthood for life. He disguised his daughter and hid 
her in the sanctuary, and 'dressed a goat in a garment and 
sacrificed it as his daughter.' The story is manifestly aetiological, 
based on a ritual with a hereditary priesthood, and the sacrifice 
of a surrogate goat dressed as a woman. 

It is probable, though not certain, that behind the figure of the 
Olympian Artemis, of the goddess who was kindly to lions' cubs 
and ' suckling whelps,' there lay the cult of some vindictive ghost 
or heroine who cried for human blood. In moments of great peril 



1 Suidas s.v. "E/xjSapis eiiii, Paroimiograph. r. 402, App. Cent, and Eustath. ad 
II. II. 732 § 331. 



ii] Placation of Ghosts 73 

this belief in the vindictiveness of ghosts, a belief kept in check 
by reason in the day-time, might surge up in a man's mind and 
haunt his dreams by night. Plutarch^ tells an instructive story 
about a dream that came to Pelopidas before the battle of Leuctra. 
Near the field of battle was a field where were the tombs of the 
daughters of Scedasos, a local hero. The maidens, who were 
obviously local nymphs, were called from the place Leuctrides. 
The night before the battle, as Pelopidas was sleeping in his tent, 
he had a vision which ' caused him no small disturbance.' He 
thought he saw the maidens crying at their tombs and cursing the 
Spartans, and he saw Scedasos their father bidding him sacrifice 
to his daughters a maiden with auburn hair if he wished to over- 
come his enemies on the morrow. Being a humane as well as 
a pious man, the order seemed to him a strange and lawless one, 
but none the less he told the soothsayers and the generals about 
it. Some of them thought that it ought not to be neglected, and 
brought forward as precedents the ancient instances of Menoiceus, 
son of Creon, and Macaria, daughter of Herakles, and, in more 
recent times, the case of Pherecydes the philosopher, who was put 
to death by the Spartans and whose skin was preserved (no doubt 
as ' medicine ') by their kings in accordance with an oracle ; also 
the case of Leonidas, who sacrificed himself for Greece ; and, lastly, 
the human victims sacrificed to Dionysos Omestes before the battle 
of Salamis, all which cases had the sanction of success. Moreover, 
they pointed out, Agesilaus, when he was about to set sail from 
Aulis itself, had the same vision as Agamemnon, and disregarding 
it through misplaced tenderness, came to grief in consequence. 
The more advanced section of the array used the argument of the 
fatherhood of God and the superior nature of the supreme deities; 
such sacrifices were only fit for Typhons and Giants and inferior 
and impotent demons. Pelopidas, while they were discussing the 
question in the abstract, only got more and more uncomfortable, 
when on a sudden a she-colt got loose from the herd and ran 
through the camp; the laymen present only admired her shining 
red coat, her proud paces and shrill neighing, but Theocritus the 
soothsayer saw the thing in his heart, and cried aloud to 
Pelopidas, 'Happy man, here is the sacred victim, wait I'M- no 

1 Plut. Vit. Pclop. XXI. 



74 



The A7ithesteria 



[CH. 



other maiden, use the one the god has given thee.' And they took 
the colt and led her to the tombs of the maidens, and prayed and 
wreathed her head and cut her throat and rejoiced and published 
the vision of Pelopidas and the sacrifice to the army. Whether 
Plutarch's story is matter of fact or not is of little moment ; it 
was felt to be probable, or else it would never have been narrated. 

I have purposely dwelt on the dark side of ivwyia-fxoi, of the 
service of the placation of ghosts, because in the vengeance of the 
ghost exacted for bloodshed lies the kernel of the doctrine of 
purification. But since man's whole activity is not bounded by 
revenge, ghosts have other and simpler needs than that of ven- 
geance. The service of the underworld is not all aversion, there 
is also some element of tendance. 

In the vase-painting in fig. 9, a design from a rather late 




Fig. 9. 



red-figured krater in the Bibliotheque Nationale' in Paris, we have 
a representation of a familiar scene, the raising of the ghost of 



1 Gat. 422. 



n] Placation of Ghosts 75 

Teiresias by Odysseus, as described in the Nekuia. Vase-paintings 
of this date tend to be rather illustrations than independent con- 
ceptions, but they sometimes serve the purpose of vivid pre- 
sentation. Odysseus^ has dug the trench, he has poured the 
drink-offering of mead and sweet wine and water, and sprinkled 
the white meal, and he has slain the sheep ; the head and feet 
of one of them, seemingly a black ram, are visible above the 
trench. He has sat him down sword in hand to keep off the 
throng of lesser ghosts, and he and his comrades wait the up-rising 
of Teiresias. Out of the very trench is seen emerging the bald 
ghost-like head of the seer. This is a clear case, not of deprecation 
but of invocation. Teiresias by the strength of the black blood 
returns to life. There is a clear reminiscence of the ghost-raising - 
that went on at many a hero's tomb, for, as will later be seen in 
the discussion of hero-worship, every hero was apt to be credited 
with mantic powers. The victims slain are in a sense, as Homer 
calls them, lepyjia ; they are sacrificed and eaten, but eaten by 
a ghost. As such they have been accompanied by offerings that 
could only be intended for drink-offerings, not the aTrovcfifxa, the 
offscourings, but libations of mead and wine and pure water. 
Here again the ghost is made in the image of man : the Homeric 
hero drinks wine in his life and demands it after his death. The 
service of the dead is here very near akin to that of the Olympians; 
it is no grim atonement, but at worst a bloody banquet, at best 
a human feast, too human, too universal to need detailed elucida- 
tion. It is a ritual founded on a belief deep-rooted and long-lived ; 
with the Greeks it was alive in Lucian's^ days. Charon asks 
Hermes why men dig a trench, and burn expensive feasts, and pour 
wine and honey into a trench, Hermes answers that he cannot 
think what good it can do to those in Hades, but ' anyhow people 
believe that the dead are summoned up from below to the feast, 
and that thoy flutter round the smoke and fat and drink the honey 
draught from the trench.' Here the ghosts invade the late and 
popular burnt sacrifice of the 01ympian.s, but the principle is the 
same. 



1 Od. XI. 23 £f. 

2 For the ceremonials of ghost-raising, see Dr W. G. Headiani, Clasnical Review, 
1902, p. .52. 

3 Luc. Char. 22. 



76 The Anthesteria [ch. ii 

The Anthesteria was a festival of ghosts, overlaid by a festival 
of Dionysos\ and so far the riddance of ghosts by means of placa- 
tion has been shown to be an important element in ancient sacrifice 
and in the ancient notion of purification. But placation of ghosts 
does not exhaust the content even of ancient sacrifice : another 
element will appear in the festival of early summer that has next 
to be considered, the Thargelia. 

^ According to Prof. Eidgeway's recent theory [J.H.S. xx. 115) the drama of 
Dionysos took its rise from mimetic dances at the tombs of local heroes and save 
for the one element of the Satyric play was not Dionysiac. The festival of the 
Anthesteria with its Pot-Contests would therefore present an easy occasion of 
fusion ; see my Primitive Athens, p. 99. Independently of Prof. Eidgeway, 
Dr M. Nilsson suggests the same origin for tragedy ; see his paper on ' Totenklage 
und Tragodie' (from Comment, philologae in hon. Joh. Paulson Gotehorg, 1905) 
resumed in the Archiv f. Religionswissenschaft, 1906, p. 286. 



CHAPTER III. 

HARVEST FESTIVALS. 

The Thargelia, Kallynteria, Plynteria. 

'A0lA0p0YM6N0l 6YAOrOYM6N, AlOOKOMeNOI ANEXOMeBA, BAACC})HM0YM6N0I 
HApAKAAOYWeN" a>C nepiKAGApMATA TOf KOCMOY erENHBHIWeN nANTOOlM 

nepiyHMA." 

Spring-time, it has been seen in the last chapter, is the season 
for purification by means of the placation of ghosts. But spring- 
time is not the only anxious time for primitive man. As the year 
wears on, a season approaches of even more critical import, when 
purification was even more imperatively needed, the season of 
harvest ; in the earliest days the gathering in of such wild fruits as 
nature herself provides, in later times the reaping and garnering 
of the various kinds of cereals. 

In the North with our colder climate we associate harvest with 
autumn; our harvest festivals fall at the end of September. 
September was to the Greek the month of the grape harvest, the 
vintage, but his grain harvest fell in ancient days as now in the 
month Thargelion, the latter part of May and the beginning of 
June. This month is marked to the Greeks by three festivals, the 
Thargelia, which gave its name to the month, the Kallynteria, and 
the Plynteria. No festival has been more frequently discussed tlian 
the Thargelia, and on no festival has comparative anthropology 
thrown more light. The full gist of the ceremony has never, I 
think, been clearly set forth, owing to the simple fact that the 
Thargelia has usually been considered ah^ne, not in connection with 



78 Harvest Festivals [ch. 

the two other festivals \ In the present chapter I shall consider 
first that element in the festival to which it and the month owe 
their names, i.e. the first-fruits ; second, the ceremony of the 
Pharmakos, which has made the festival famous ; third the con- 
nection with the Kallynteria and Plynteria and the light thrown 
on both by the Roman festival of the Vestalia. Finally from the 
consideration of the gist of these harvest festivals it will be 
possible to add some further elements to our conception of Greek 
religious thought, and especially of the Greek notion of sacrifice. 



Thargelion and Thargelia. 

About the meaning^ of the word Thargelia there is happily 
not the slightest doubt. Athenaeus^ quotes a statement made by 
Krates, a writer of about the middle of the 2nd century B.C., in his 
book on the Attic dialect as follows: 'The thargelos is the first 
loaf made after the carrying home of the harvest.' Now a loaf of 
bread is not a very primitive affair, but happily Hesychius^ records 
an earlier or at least more rudimentary form of nourishment : 
'Thargelos,' he says, 'is a pot full of seeds.' From Athenaeus' 
again we learn that the cake called thargelos was sometimes also 
called thalusios. The Thalusia, the festival of the first-fruits of 
Demeter, is familiar to us from the lovely picture in the Seventh 
Idyll of Theocritus^ The friends meet Lycidas the goatherd and 
say to him: 

' The road on which our feet are set it is a harvest way, 
For to fair-robed Demeter our comrades bring to-day 
The first-fruits of their harvesting. She on the threshing place 
Great store of barley grain outpoured, for guerdon of her grace.' 

1 A. Mommsen {Feste der Stadt Athen, p. 486) discusses the Thargelia, Kallyn- 
teria and Plynteria in immediate succession, but without a hint of the connection 
of the two last with the first; for the non-Attic Thargelia see Dr M. P. Nilsson's 
Griechische Feste, which has appeared since the publication of my first edition. 

^ Vanicek (s.v. p. 310) derives QapyriXia, which appears also in the form TapyrjXia, 
from a root rapy meaning 'hot' and 'dry' and connects it with rpvy in rpvaKuj, 
Tpvydii} etc. All these analogous forms have the same meaning, i.e. 'rii^ened by 
the sun,' 'ready for harvesting.' 

3 Athen. iii. 52, p. 115 ddpyrikov KoKelffdai rbv €k rrji crvyKO/xiSrji irpwrov yevbfxevov 
apTOv. 

* Hesych. s.v. ddpyrfKos x'^tR"' i<^TLV dvaTrXeus (Firepixa/nav. 

^ loc. cit. supra. 

•> Theocr. Id. vii. 31 a 5' 656s oiSe QaXvaias. 



Ill] Thargelia 79 

Homer 1 tells how the plague of the Calydonian boar came to 
waste the land of the Aetolians, because Oineus then' king forgot 
to celebrate the Thalusia, and Eustathius, commenting on the 
passage, says: 'The first-fruits are the thalusia.' He adds that 
some of the rhetoricians call the thalusia 'feasts of the Harvest- 
Home.' 

It is then abundantly clear that the festival of the Thargelia is 
in the main a festival of the offering of first-fruits on the occasion 
of harvest, and the month Thargelion the month of harvest rites. 
Of one of these harvest rites, the carrying of the Eiresione-, we 
have unusually full particulars. 

In the Knights of Aristophanes ^ Cleon and the Sausage-Seller 
are clamouring at the door of Demos. Demos comes out and asks 

angrily: 

' Who's bawling there ? do let the door alone, 
You've torn my Eiresione all to bits.' 

The scholiast explains. 'At the Pyanepsia and the Thargelia 
the Athenians hold a feast to Helios and the Horae, and the boys 
carry about branches twined with wool, from which they get the 
name of Eiresiones, and they hang them up before the doors.' It is 
very probable that the wool {elpos), taken perhaps from a sacred 
animal, gave its name to the Eiresione, but there were many other 
things besides wool hung on the branch. Our fullest account 
comes from the rhetorician Pausanias, who is quoted by Eustathius'' 
in his commentary on the Iliad. Eustathius is explaining that 
the term a/ji(f)i,6a\.rj<i means a child with both parents alive, and he 
adds by way of illustration that children of this sort were chosen 
by the ancients to deck out the Eiresione. He then quotes from 
the works of Pausanias the following account of the ceremony: 

1 Horn. 11. IX. 534 

ol ov TL doKvcria yovvi^ dXwTjs 

EuBtatL. ad loc. 0aXu<na oi ai dirapxai-.-Tiv^s de tQv prjTdpwf Kal avyKop.i.aT-f)pi.a ravra 
KaXovaiv . . Jri S^ Kal 6a\v<no9 dpros 6 iK rfji tCjv Kapirwi', (jjaal, ffvyKo/j-idiji irpGnos 
yiu6/j.(voi. 

- The Hources for the Eiresione are very fully given and discussed by Mannhardt, 
Wald- und Fcldkulte, pp. 214—248; see Dr Frazer, (ioldeii Bough, 2nd edition, 
vol. I. p. 190, for modern parallels. 

' Ar. AVy. 720, schol. ad loc. 

* Eustath. ad //. xxii. 490, p. 1283 

flpfcrnJjvr] crvKa tp^pei Kal irLovai Aprons 

Kai fiiXLTos Koru\T]v Kal iXaiov iinKp-qaaaOai 

Kal KvXiKa fC^wpov 'iua /xiOvovcra KaOcvSy. 



80 Harvest Festivals [ch. 

'The Eiresione is a branch of olive twined with wool, and having 

hanging from it various fruits of the earth ; a boy, both of whose 

parents are alive, carries it forth and places it in front of the doors 

of Apollo's sanctuary, at the feast of Pj'anepsia.' He then goes on 

to an aetiological legend about Theseus, and finally records the 

words of the song sung by the children who carried or attended 

the Eiresione : 

' Eiresione brings 
All good things, 
Figs and fat cakes to eat, 
Soft oil and honey sweet, 
And brimming wine-cup deep 
That she may drink and sleep.' 

The boy who actually carried the Eiresione must have both 
parents alive, because any contact with death even remote was 
unlucky; the ghost of either parent might be about. The song is 
of some interest because of the half-personification of Eiresione. 
The Maypole or harvest-sheaf is halfway to a harvest Maiden; it 
is thus, as will be seen later, that a goddess is made. A song is 
sung, a story told, and the very telling fixes the outline of 
personality. It is possible to worship long in spirit, but as soon as 
the story-telling, myth-making, instinct awakes you have anthro- 
pomorphism and theology. 

What was hung on the Eiresione no doubt depended on the 
wealth of particular worshippers ; we hear of white wool and 
purple wool, vessels of wine, figs, strings of acorns, cakes ; nothing 
in the way of natural produce came amiss. The Eiresione once 
fixed over the door remained there, a charm against pestilence and 
famine, till the next year; then it was changed for a new one. 
The withered branch must have been a familiar sight at Athens. 
When iu the Plutus^ of Aristophanes the young rough is insulting 
the old woman and thrusting his torch into her withered face, she 
cries : 

'For pity's sake don't bring your torch so near me,' 

and Chremylus says; 

•Yes, right she is, for if she caught a spark 
She'd burn up like an old Eiresione.' 

^ Ar. Plut. 1054, schol. ad loc. ravTTjv Si ttjv dpecnuiv-qv irpo tQv oiKri/j.dTwv 
irldevTO oi 'Adrivaiot Kal kut' #tos aiiTrjv ifWarTOv ...eKaaroi irpo tQv dvpwv ^aTrjaav 
elpecnufai els dTrorpoTrrjv tov \oifiov, Kal SUfxeuev els inavrdf. rjv Kal ^-qpavdelaav irakLv 
/car' Htos iiroiei eripav x^od^ovaav. 



in] Elresione 81 

The EiresioDe, Pausanias says, was fastened before the door of 
the sanctuary of Apollo. Plutarch \ in his rather clumsy aetio- 
logieal account of the Oschophoria, connects the Eiresione with 
vows paid to Apollo by Theseus on his return from Crete to 
Athens. Harpocration" says ' The Thargelia was celebrated in the 
month of Thargelion, which is sacred to Apollo,' and the author of 
the Etymologicon Magnum^ states ' The Thargelia, a festival at 
Athens. The name is given from the thargelia, and thargelia are 
all the fruits that spring from the earth. The festival is celebrated 
in the month Thargelion to Artemis and Apollo.' From Suidas'* 
we learn that there was a musical contest at the Thargelia, and 
that the actors dedicated their prize tripods in the sanctuary of 
Apollo known as the Pythion. 

All this makes it quite clear that at some time or other the 
festival of the Thargelia was connected with the Olympian Apollo, 
and more vaguely with his sister Artemis, but the connection is 
obviously loose and late. The Eiresione was fastened up not only 
over the door of the sanctuary of Apollo, but over the house-door 
of any and every Athenian. The house of Demos was no sanctuary 
of Apollo. Moreover, when the scholiast on Aristophanes*^ is com- 
menting on the Eiresione, he says, to our surprise, that it was 
carried and hung at the Thargelia and P^^anepsia in honour, not of 
Apollo and Artemis, but of ' Helios and the Horae.' Porphyry" 
does not definitely name the Eiresione, but he is clearly alluding 
to it when he speaks of the procession that still took place at 
Athens in his own day to Helios and the Horae. It is evidence, 
he says, that in early days the gods desired in their service 
not the sacrifice of animals, but the offering of vegetable first- 
fruits. ' In this procession they carried wild herbs as well as 
ground pulse, acorns, bai-ley, wheat, a cake of dried figs, cakes of 
wheat and barley flour, and a pot {')(yTpo<;).' 

It is abundantly clear that the Eiresione is simply a harvest- 
home, an offering of first-fruits that was primarily an end in itself, 

' I'lut. Vit. Then, xviii. The account of Plntaich is .siilistantiiill.v tlu' same as 
that of his contemporary I'auBanias the rhetorician ; holli apix^ar to ciraw from Honic 
common Houn*, which may be KrateH' wipl 0vaiQi> : see Manniiurdl, Wnlil- uiul 
Feldknlte, p. 219. 

■•' Harpocrat. s.v. •' Ktijin. Mtiii. s.v. 

•» SuidaB H.v. WvOlov. '' HcJiol. ad Ar. I'hil. 10r,.l. 

* Porph. de Ahut. ii. 7. The text contains obscure words, e.g. dXvairoa of which 
Nauck observes loci medela iiobU ncyata, but those translated above seem certain. 

H. 



g2 Harvest Festivals [ch. 

but that could easily be affiliated to any dominant god. It will be 
remembered^ that Oineus got into trouble because, when all the 
other gods had their feasts of hecatombs, he did not offer first- 
fruits to Artemis, great daughter of Zeus. Oineus, we may con- 
jecture, was the faithful conservative worshipper of earlier gods; 
the Atheuians were wiser in their generation ; their ancient service 
of the primitive Helios and the Horae they somehow affiliated to 
that of the incoming Olympians. 

It remains to ask more precisely what was the primitive signifi- 
cance of the offering of first-fruits. At first sight it may seem 
as if the question were superfiuous. Surely we have here the 
simplest possible instance of the service of ' tendance ' {eepaireia), 
the primitive sacrifice that embodies the very essence of do ut des, 
a gift given to the god to ' smooth his face,' a gift that necessarily 
presupposes the existence of a god with a face to be smoothed. 

Such seems to have been the view of Aristotle^ He says in 
characteristically Greek fashion, 'They hold sacrifices, and meetings 
in connection therewith, paying rites of worship to the gods while 
providing rest and recreation for themselves. For the most ancient 
sacrifices and meetings seem to be as it were offerings of first- 
fruits after the gathering in of the various harvests. For those 
were the times of year when the ancients were especially at leisure.' 
Aristotle clearly takes the view of sacrifice already discussed, that 
sacrifice is mainly an occasion for enjoyment and the result of 
leisure, but his remark as to its early connection with first-fruits 
goes deeper down than he himself knows. Kegarded as a dvala, 
a sacrifice, the offering of first-fruits presupposes, as we have said, 
a god or spirit to whom sacrifice is made, and a god of human 
passions. But it must not be forgotten that in this view we are 
making a very large assumption, i.e. that of the existence of some 
such god or spirit. It is instructive to note that among other 
primitive races ceremonies have been observed which apparently 
are not addressed to any god or spirit, and yet which seem to 
contain in them a possible germ of some idea akin to sacrifice. 

1 Iliad loc. cit. supra. 

'- Aristot. Eth. Nic. 1160 0. ix. 5 dvalas re Troiovvres Kai irepl ravras avvodovf, 
Ttuds <:t€> dirov^fJ-OVTei rois 6eois kuI avrois dvaTravaeLS Tropi^ovres p.ed' ijdovijs. al 
yap dpYaiat Ovffiai Kai avvoSoi (paivovTaL yiveadaL ixerd ras rCov Kapiri^v avyKOfiLdaS 
oiov dirapxa^- fJ^oXiaTa yap iv tovtois eaxo^o-^ov rots Kaipols. 



ni] Removal of taboo 83 

Such are the ceremonies of the Australian Arunta, observed 
and described in detail by Messrs Spencer and Gillen^ These 
ceremonies, consisting of length}^ and elaborate mummeries, are 
called Intichiuma, and their object seems to be to secure the 
increase of the animal or plant associated with a particular totem. 
The pantomimes enacted seem to be of the nature of sympathetic 
magic, and they are interspersed with chanted invitations to the 
particular plant or animal to be fertile. The point of special 
interest is that the ceremonies are closely connected with certain 
taboos on particular foods. Mr Lang- suggests that the removal 
of the taboo at the time of the Intichiuma may indicate that the 
necessary ' close time ' is over. The imposition of the taboo is on 
this showdng not due to any primary moral instinct in man, but 
simply a practical necessity if the plant or animal is not to become 
extinct. The removal of the taboo after a suitable lapse of time 
is, if man himself is not to become extinct, equally practical and 
necessary. This sort of taboo is in fact a kind of primitive ' game 
law.' Philochoros^ gives an instance : ' At Athens,' he says, ' a 
prohibition was issued that no one should eat of unshorn lamb on 
the occasion of failure in the breed of sheep.' If at the end of the 
close time it was customary to eat a little of a plant or animal, 
the eating being accompanied by certain solemn ceremonials, the 
food itself would easily come to be regarded as specially sacred 
and as having sacramental virtue, and the farther step would soon 
be taken of regarding it as consecrated to certain spirits or 
divinities. This may have been in part the origin of the offering 
of first-fruits. 

The removal of a taboo is assuredly not the same thing as the 
worship of a god, but it is easy to see how the one might slide over 
into the other. A taboo is by common consent placed upon the 
harvest fruits till all are ripe : such harvest-fruits are sacred, for- 
bidden, dangerous. Why ? As soon as primitive man has fashioned 
for himself any sort of god in his own image, the answer is ready, 
'The Lord thy God is a jealous God.' Primitive man is so 
instinctively anthropomorphic that it seems to me rash to assert 

1 Spencer and Gillen, Native Triheti of Central Australia, pp. 107 If . 
^ A. Lang, Religion and Magic, p. 265. 

■* Philoch. ap. Allien, i. Ki, p. 9 <I>iX(5xo/5os 5^ laropd Kal KeKw\v(rdat 'AOrivnffi. 
airiKTov dpvos ixtfoiva yfueffdai. tVtXtTroi/cTTjs Trore riji Tuif i'tfiuv rovrwv yivictm. 

G— 2 



§4 Harvest Festivals [ch. 

that the notion o^ i^hoo precedes that of sacrifice. The natives of 
Central Australia appear to have taboo without the notion of sacri- 
fice, i.e. of any spirit to whom sacrifice is made ; another race might 
have a primitive notion of a spirit to be placated without the 
notion of taboo ; or the two might be inextricably blended and only 
our modern habit of pitiless analysis separate them. 

Late writers on ritual, and it is only late that there are such 
writers, always explain taboo as consecration rather than prohibi- 
tion. Festus^ says 'they called the juice of the vine sacrima because 
they sacrificed (or consecrated) it to Liber with a view to the protec- 
tion of the vineyards and the vessels and the wine itself, just as 
they sacrificed to Ceres a first harvest from the ears they had first 
reaped.' Here the ' sacramental ' wine is clearly a sacrifice of the 
Olympian kind ; but in the Pithoigia, already discussed, the more 
primitive notions of release from taboo and ' aversion ' of evil 
influences clearly emerge. ' Libation of the new wine is poured 
out that the use of the magical thing ((fyapfiuKov) may become 
harmless and a means of safety ^' In the Thargelia Ave have no 
definite information as to a solemn eating as well as offering of 
first-fruits, but this element will appear when we reach the great 
harvest festival commonly known as the Eleusinian Mysteries. 

It remains to note some details as to the material of sacrifice. 
The general principle is clear and simple. The god fares as his 
worshipper. Porphyry', in discussing the various kinds of animals 
sacrificed, observes with much common sense, ' No Greek sacrifices 
a camel or an elephant to the gods, because Greece does not 
produce camels and elephants.' 

It might not be necessary to state a fact so obvious but that 
writers on the subject of ritual seem haunted by the notion that 
certain animals are sacrificed to certain gods because they are in 
some mystical sense ' sacred to them,' and this notion has intro- 
duced much needless complexity. It is quite true that locally we 
find certain taboos on the sacrifice of certain animals, the cause of 



1 Fest. § 318 sacrima appellabant mustum quod Libero sacrificabant, pro vineis 
et vasis et ipso vino conservando, sicut praemetium de spicis quas primum messuis- 
sent sacriticabaiit Cereri. 

- Plut. Q. Sijm]}. III. 7. 1 Kal -rrdXai. 7' lis ^oiKef tiJXOVTO tov otvov irplv -q wieiv 
dTroairivdovTes d/3Xaj3^ Kai ffWT^piov avTols tov (pap/xaKov tt}v xPW'" yeveaOai. 

3 Porph. de Abst. i. 14. 



in] Material of sacrifice 85 

which is unknown, but these taboos are local and by no means 
uniform. Moreover the animal ' sacred ' to the particular god is by 
no means always the material of sacrifice ; the owl, for reasons to 
be later discussed, is ' sacred ' to Athene, but we hear of no 
sacrifice of owls. Broadly then, as noted before, the material 
of sacrifice is conditioned, not by the character of the god, but by 
the circumstances of the worshipper. 

The principle that the god fares as his worshipper is however 
crossed by another, he sometimes fares loorse. This was noticed 
by writers on ritual such as Porphyry ^ and Eustathius-, and they 
explain it as a sort of survival of a golden age of simple manners, 
dear to the conservatism of the gods. This conservatism of the 
gods mirrors, of course, the natural and timid conservatism of their 
worshippers. They have begun by offering just what they eat them- 
selves, and, from the fact that they have once offered it, they attach 
to this food special sanctity. They advance in civilization, and 
their own food becomes more delicate and complex, but they dare 
not make any change in the diet of their gods ; they have learnt 
to bake and eat fermented bread themselves, but the gods are still 
nurtured (m barley grains and porridge. Porphyry-' reduces the 
successive stages of sacrifice to a regular system of progressive 
vegetarianism. First men plucked and offered grass, which was 
like the ' soft wool ' of the earth ; then the fruit of trees and their 
leaves, the acorn and the nut ; then barley appeared first of the 
grains, and they offered simple barley-corns ; then they broke and 
bruised grain and made it into cakes. In like fashion they made 
libations first of water, then of honey, the natural liquid prepared 
for us by bees, thirdly of oil, and last of all of wine ; but after 
each advance the older service remained ' in memory of the ancient 
manner of life.' Last, through diverse influences of ignorance and 
fear, came 'the luxury of flesh and imported forms of diet^.' 

The incoming of the luxury of flesh diet was, it has already 
been noted, due not to ignorance and fear but to the inroad 

' I'orph. de Ahst. ii. 56. The treatise of Porphyry, so far as it relates to sacrifice, 
is mainly based ou the previous treatise of Theophrastos. 

'-' Eustatli. ad 11. i. 449 § 132. 

•* I'orph. de Abut. ii. 20. 

■♦ I'orph. loc. cit. ixerd oe tov% oi'Aoxi'ras al Ovcrlai Kai rj iv avrah Kpedxpayia. 
Cl6ti Kai /nerd rrjc Tuiv avayKalwv TpocpQv eupeffif ij ttjs /c/jewSoicrios Tro\vT^\(ia Kai t6 
Trjs Tpo4>yji (TreiffaKTOv tVprirai. 



86 Harvest Festivals [ch. 

of a flesh-eating Northern race whose splendid physical stature 
and strength Porphyry was little likely to appreciate. They were 
not wholly flesh-eaters ; hence, as has been seen, they offered the 
sacrifice of the barley grains {ovXoxiJTai), and offered these at a time 
when they were themselves eating some form of manufactured bread. 
The primitive character of the rite is, I think, marked by the ritual 
precedence. The ovXoxyTai, the sprinkling of grains, has usually 
been explained as the sprinkling of meal on the heads of the 
victims, as the equivalent of the mola salsa of the Romans ; but 
Eustathius is probably right when, in commenting on the sacrifice 
of NestorS he says, ' the sprinkled grains are in memory of the food 
of old times which consisted in grains, i.e. barley-corns.' ' Hence,' 
he adds, ' one of the ancient commentators explains the sprinkled 
grains as barley-corns.' That ov\o')(yrat were nothing more nor 
less than the actual barley-corns is also shown by a passage from 
Strato^. A cook, who apparently from his use of archaic termino- 
logy is according to his master more like a male sphinx than a 
cook, calls for ovK.o')(yTai : 

' OvKoxvTai — why what on earth is that ? ' 

And the answer is 

'Just barley-corns.' 

The first act in a Homeric sacrifice was uniformly prayer and 
the sprinkling of grain ^ and it is important to observe that 
Eustathius'* expressly notes this as a previous sacrifice {7rp60v/xa) ; 
the ov\oj(yTai were, he says, a mixture of grain and salt poured on 
the altar before the sacrificial ceremony began. By the ' sacrificial 
ceremony ' Eustathius means the slaying of the animal victim. 
It is important to note that the grain was poured on the altar 
and was therefore in itself a sacrifice, as it is sometimes stated 
that it was merely thrown on the head of the victim. The state- 
ment of Eustathius is confirmed by the account in Euripides^ 

1 Eustath. ad Od. iii. 440, 1476. 37 tbs Kal ot ov\ox^'''aL r^s TraXatas Tpo<f)TJi 
avejxi/jiVTjcrKOP rrjs re twu ovXwu, owep iarl tQv KpidQf, 5i6 Kai tovs oiiXoxiJTas tG}v tis 
TToXaiQiv Kptdas iipp-rivevaev. 

- Strato ap. Athen. ix. 29, p. 382. 

3 For a full discussion of ovXai and ovXoxiJTai see Dr H. von Fritze, Hermes 1897, 
p. 236. 

4 Eustath. ad 11. i. 449 § 132, 23 e'url U ov\oxvTai...ra Trpo0vfxara...ol oiiXox^rai. 
ov\ai ■^crav rovriaTi. Kpidal [xera. aXQv az iirix^ov rots pco/j-oh vpo rijs iepovpyias. 

5 Eur. El. 804 

Xa^Cjv 5e irpox^TO-i fn]Tp6s evvirrfs criOev 



ni] SprlnMlng of gram 87 

of the sacrifice made by Aegisthus to the Nymphs. Here, before 
the elaborate slaying of the bull, we have, just as in Homer, the 
sprinkling of the grain, and it is sprinkled on the altar. The 
Messenger tells Electra that when all was ready Aegisthus 

' Took the grains for sprinkling and he cast them 
Upon the altar and these words he spake.' 

The sprinkling of salted meal (mola salsa) was, if we may believe 
Athenaeus^ a later innovation. He tells us distinctly, quoting 
Athenion as his authority, that the use of salt for seasoning was 
a comparatively late discovery and therefore excluded from certain 
sacrifices to the gods. 

' Whence even now, remembering days of old, 
The entrails of their victims for the gods 
They roast with tire and bring no salt thereto, 
Because at first they knew no use for salt. 
And even when they knew and loved its savour 
They kept their fathers' sacred written precepts.' 

The sacrifice of the animal victim never in Homer takes place 
without the 'previous sacrifice' of grain-sprinkling and prayer, 
but prayer and gi^ain-sprinkling can take place, as in the prayer of 
Penelope-, without the animal sacrifice. This looks as though the 
animal sacrifice were rather a supplementary later-added act than 
a necessary climax. Later, when animal sacrifice became common 
and even as a rule imperative, the real sacrificial intent of the 
preliminary gi-ain-sprinkling would naturally become obscured and 
it would be brought into connection with animal sacrifice by the 
practice of sprinkling grain on the heads of the victims. 

By Plutarch's^ time the sprinkling of grain was regarded as 
something of an archaeological curiosity. He asks in his Greek 
Questions ' Who is he who is called among the Opuntians kritho- 
logos! i.e. the ' barley collector ' ? The answer is ' Most of the 
Greeks make use of barley for their very ancient sacrifices when 
the citizens offer first-fruits. And the man who regulates these 
sacrifices and gets in these first-fruits is called krithologos.' He 
adds a curious detail illustrative of the two strata of worship, 'and 
they had two priests, one to supervise divine things, one for those 
of things demonic' In like archaic fashion, when Pisthctairos* 

1 Athen. xiv. 81, p. 661. 2 Horn. Ud. iv. 701. 

:» riut. g. Gr. VI. •» Ar, Av. 622. 



88 Harvest Festivals [ch. 

would inaugurate the blessed simplicity of bird-rule, he revives 
the ancient ritual of the sprinkling of barley-corns : 

' better than worship of Zeus Most High 
Is the service of Birds that sing and fly. 
They ask for no carven temple's state, 
They clamour not for a golden gate. 
The shrine they ask of a mortal's vow 
Is leave to perch on an olive bough. 
In the little thickets of ash and oak 
They dwell anigh us. We humble folk 
Never need fare to the far-off" lands 
Of Ammon or Delphi, but lift our hands 
Under our vine and our fig-tree's shade. 
For a slender grace let our pi'ayer be said, 
As we cast up our barley in little showers 
And a little grace from the Birds is om's.' 

The barley grain sprinkled is part of the ritual of the Olympians, 
but in the case of the tvv^o survivals to be next considered, the 
pelanos and the nephalia, their use was almost wholly confined to, 
and characteristic of, the lower stratum of worship, that of ghosts 
and sprites and underworld divinities. 

After the sacrifice of the natural fruits of the earth, the 
TrayKapTTia, comes the most primitive form of artificial food, i.e. 
the pelanos, a sort of porridge. 

We speak of Bread and Wine as sacramental elements, but 
both are far removed from being elemental. Leavened bread, the 
Greek apro^i, is a product of advanced civilization, and with a true 
conservative ritual instinct the Roman Church prescribes to this 
day the use of the unleavened wafei\ Athenaeus\ citing the author 
of a play called the Beggars, tells us that when the Athenians set 
a meal in the Prytaneum for the Dioscuri the}^ serve upon the 
tables cheese and barley-porridge {(^vo-rrjv) and chopped olives 
and leeks, making remembrance of their ancient mode of life. 
And Solon bids them supply to those who had free meals in the 
Prytaneum barley cake (fMa^av), but at feasts to place in addition 
loaves of bread (apTov), and this in imitation of Homer. For 
Homer, when he brought the chiefs together to Agamemnon, says 
' they stirred up meal.' The words ' they stirred up meal,' ^vpero 
^' a\(f)tTa, do not occur in our text, but the author of the Beggars 
clearly refers to the ordinary Homeric meal, and takes us straight 

1 Athen. iv. 14, p. 137. 



ni] The pelanos 89 

back to the real primitive meaning of pelartos. On the shield of 
Achilles' we have the picture of a harvest feast : 

'The heralds dight the feast apart beneath a spreading oak, 
The ox they slew, and much white barley-meal the women folk 
Sprinkled, a supper for the thralls.' 

The lord and his fellows feast on flesh-meat, the workmen have 
their supper of primitive porridge. So the Townley scholiast 
clearly understands the passage ; he comments : iraXwov, efxaacrov 
rj €(f)vpov, ' they sprinkle, i.e. they knead or mix together.' It is 
noticeable that he employs the exact word, €<f)vpov, quoted by 
Athenaeus as in the text of Homer". To explain the passage as 
* sprinkle on the heads of the victims or on the roast flesh ' is to 
miss the whole antithesis between master aud man. Eustathius^ 
that close observer of primitive fact, saw what was being done in 
Homer and doubtless still by the poor of his own days. He says 
' to sprinkle barley-meal does not mean bread-making but a sort 
of paste in ordinary use among the ancients.' To any one who has 
watched the making of porridge, the shift of meaning from iraXv- 
vetv, to sprinkle, to (f}vpetv and [xdcra-eiv, to stir and to knead, is 
natural and necessary. You first sprinkle the meal on the water, 
you then stir it, so far you have porridge ; if you let it get thicker 
and thicker you must knead it and then j^ou have oat-cake. It 
has of course frequently been noted that a pelanos may be either 
fluid or solid, and herein lies the explanation. When the pelanos 
is thick and subjected to fire, baked, it becomes a pemma, an 
ordinary cake. The Latin lihum*, a cake, is a strict parallel ; it 
was primarily a thing out-poured, a libation, then a solid thing 
cooked and eaten. 

A pelanos was then primarily the same as alphita, barley-meal. 

1 Horn. //. XVIII. 560. 

- The process of primitive bread-making is fully discussed by Prof. Benndorf 
{Eranos Vindobcnsis, p. 374), to wlioui I am indebted for the view here expressed. 
In Yorkshire within my own remembrance a rather rej)ulsive mess of corn stewed 
in milk with currants was always eaten on Christmas Eve before the regular feast 
began. It was served as soup and called J'runtiiu'ti/. 

•* Eustath. ad II. xviii. .5(513 t6 5e waXvvttv dXcpira ovd^ vvv BrjXoi aproirouav dWa 
TO (Triirafffia (Ti'ivrjdes ov rois iraXaioti, and again in discussing the feast of Etmiaeus 
(§ 17.^>l, 33) 6 5' d\(f)iTa \fVKa ewaXvvev, 6 iariv iTriwacre Kara ^Ooi apxc-iof to varepov 
ap^/rjaav. 

^ Varro L.L. v. 100 libum (juod ut libaretur. The Latin puis and polcuta are 
probably from the same root as rr^Xavos. Pliny {N.ll. xviii. 1!)) says it is dear tliat 
in ancient days puUc iioii pane lioimtno.i vixinse. He adds that to his day primitive 
rites and those on birthdays are carried on with jmlne. 



90 Harvest Festivals [ch. 

The food of man was the food of the gods, but the word was early 
specialized off to ritual use. There is, I believe, no instance in 
which a pelanos, under that name, is eaten in daily life or indeed 
eaten at all save by Earth and underworld gods, their repre- 
sentative snakes and other Spirits of Aversion \ The comic poet 
Sannyrion- puts it thus : 

' We gods do call it pelanos, 
You pompous mortals barley-meal.' 

To us the pomposity seems on the side of the gods. 

As there was a time when leavened bread was not, and men 
ate porridge cooked or uncooked, so before the coming of the vine 
men drank a honey drink. And as the conservative gods, long 
after men ate fermented bread, were faithful to their porridge, so 
long after men drank wine they still offered to the gods who 
were there before the coming of the vine ' wineless libations/ 
nephalia^ 

The ritual of the underworld gods is in many respects identical 
with that of the ghosts out of which they are developed, but with 
this difference — ghosts are less conservative than fully developed 
gods ; the habits and tastes of ghosts are more closely akin to those 
of the men who worship them. Quite early, it would appear, man 
offered to ghosts the wine he loved so well himself 

Atossa* brings for the ghost of Darius a pelanos, as was meet. 
She brings also all manner of ' soothing gifts ' {fxeiXiKTTqpia), but 
she pours wine also : 

' A holy heifer's milk, white, fair to drink, 
Bright honey drops from flowers bee-distilled, 
With draughts of water from a virgin fount, 
And from the ancient vine its mother wild 
An unmixed draught, this gladness ; and fair fruit 
Of gleaming olive ever blossoming 
And woven flowers, children of mother earth.' 

The dead fare as the living ; wine is added to milk and honey 

^ Aeseh. Pers. 204 dTrorp^Trwcrt dalfj-oai, and 523 yy re Kal (pdiroLS dtoprjixara. 

2 Sannyr. frg. 1 Koch. 

* The sources for vrjcpaXia are well collected and discussed by Dr von Fritze, De 
Libatione veterum Graecontm, Berlin 1893, also by Stengel, Hermes xxii. p. 645, and 
' Chthonische und Totenkult ' in Festschrift fiir Fricdlander, p. 418, and W. Barth, 
' Bestattungsspende bei den Griechen,' Neue Jahrhiicher fiir Mass. Altertiim. 1900, 
p. 177. W. Barth draws distinctions between the cultus of the dead and that of 
chthonic divinities, which I think cannot be clearly made out. 

•» Aesch. Pers. 607. 



m] Nephalla 91 

and olive oil and water, but wine perhaps significantly as an 
innovation is never named. Atossa seems also consciously to 
insist over much on its being wild, primitive, ancient, and therefore 
permissible. We are reminded of the religious shifts to which the 
Romans were put by the introduction of wine into their daily life 
and thence into their ritual. Plutarch^ in his Roman Questions says 
that ' when the women poured libations of wine to Bona Dea, they 
called it by the name of milk,' and Macrobius- adds ' that wine 
could not be brought in under its own name, but the wine was 
called milk and the vessel containing it a honey-jar.' 

The ghosts of the dead adniit and even welcome the addition 
of wine, but actual chthonic divinities are stricter. When Oedipus^ 
comes to the precinct of the Semnae, the Chorus bid him make 
atonement, because, though unwittingly, he has violated the 
precinct. He asks the precise ritual to be observed. The answer, 
though it is thrice familiar, is so important for the understanding 
of chthonic ceremonies that it must be given in full : 

' Oed. And with what rites, O strangers ? teach me this. 
Chor. First, fetch thou from an ever-flowing fount, 

Borne in clean hands, an holy drink-offering. 
Oed. And next, when I have brought the holy draught ? 
Chor. Bowls are there next, a cunning craftsman's work, 

Crown thou their lips and handles at the brim. 
Oed. With branches, woollen webs, or in what wise ? 
Chor. Of the ewe-lamb take thou the fresh-shoiii wool. 
Oed. So be it, and then to what last rite I pass ? 
Chor Pour thy drink ofterings, facewards to the dawn. 
Oed. With these same vessels do I pour the draught ? 
Chor, Yes, in three streams, the last pour wholly out. 
Oed. And filled wherewith this last ? teach me this also. 
Chor. Water and honey — hring no wine thereto. 
Oed. When the dark shadowed earth hath drunk of this ? 
Chor. Lay on it thrice nine sprays of olive tree 

With both thine hands, and make thy prayer the while. 
Oed. That prayer ? vouchsafe to teach, for mighty is it. 
Clior. Pray th(ju that, as they are called the Kindly Ones, 

With kindly hearts they may receive and bless. 

Be this thy prayer, thine own or his who prays 

For thee. Whisper thy prayer nor lift thy voice, 

Then go, look not behind, so all is well.' 

The Kindly Ones, though their name is only adjectival, have 

' Plut. (.). II. XX. dlvov 5' a.vrrf airlvoovai. -ydXa irpoaayopevovffai. 
2 Macr. I. 12. 25 (juod vas in (juo vinum inditum est mellarium nominetur et 
vinurii lac nuncuijetur. 
'•> Soph. Oed. Col. 468. 



92 Harvest Festivals [pH. 

crystallized into divinities ; they are no longer ghosts, and none 
may tamper with their archaic ritual. 

For the dread counterpart of the Euraenides, the Erinyes, 
there is the same wineless service, witness the reproach of 
Clytaemnestra. The Erinyes have deserted her, yet she has given 
them of the ritual they exact ^ : 

' Full oft forsooth from me have ye licked up 
Wineless libations, sober balms of wrath.' 

To offer wine was the last outrage done by the parvenu 
Apollo to ancient ritual, hence the bitter protest^: 

' Thou hast bewildered the old walks of life, 
With wine the Ancient Goddesses undone.' 

The wineless service of the Eumenides in the Oedipus Goloneus 
is of course no mere invention of the poet. At Titane near Sicyon 
Pausanias^ came to a grove of evergreen oaks and a temple of the 
goddesses whom, he says, the Athenians call Semnae, but the 
Sicyonians Eumenides, and every year on one day they celebrate 
a festival in their honour, ' sacrificing sheep with young and a 
libation of luater and honey.' 

The scholiast in the Oedipus Coloneus^ gives a list of the 
divinities to whom at Athens wineless sacrifices were made. 
He quotes as his authority Polemon. ' The Athenians were 
careful in these matters and scrupulously pious (oaioi) in the 
things that pertain to the gods, and they made wineless sacrifices 
to Mnemosyne the Muse, to Eos, to Helios, to Selene, to the 
Nymphs, to Aphrodite Ourania.' The list is at first surprising. 
We associate nephalia with the Underworld powers, but here it is 
quite clear that, in primitive days, side by side with the Earth-gods 
were worshipped sky-gods, but in their own simple being as 
Dawn and Sun and Moon, not as full-blown human Olympians. 
Mnemosyne^ it will later be seen, had a well of living water herself; 
she needed no wine. The Heavenly Aphrodite is more surprising, 
but her honey libation is further attested by Empedokles". He 

1 Aesch. Eum. 104. 2 Aesch. Bum. 727. 

'^ P. II. 11. 3. The relation between the Semnae and the Eumenides and 
the ritual of the Semnae, which is identical with that of the Eumenides, will be 
discussed later in Chapter v. 

■* Schol. ad Oed. Col. 100. s Porph. de antr. Nymph. 7. 

^ Emped. frg. ap. Porph. de Ahst. 11. 21. 



in] The Jireless sacrifice 93 

tells of the days long ago when the god Ares was not, nor King 
Zeus, nor Kronos, nor Poseidon, but only 

' Kypris the Queen 
Here they adored with pious images, 
With painted victims and with fragrant scents, 
With fume of frankincense and genuine myrrh. 
Honey of yellow bees upon the ground 
They for libation poured.' 

But though here and there a very early 'Heavenly One' claimed 
the honey service, it was mostly the meed of the dead. Porphyry 
knew that honey was used to embalm the body of the dead because 
it prevented putrefaction, and this custom of honey burial is 
echoed in the myth of Glaukos and the honey-jar. The marvellous 
sweetness of honey lent itself to the notions of propitiation and 
placation — ' sweets to the sweet ' or rather, as it seemed to the 
practical primitive mind, ' sweets to the spirits to be sweetened,' 
the Meilichioi, ghosts and heroes to be appeased \ 

One more element in archaic ritual yet remains to be con- 
sidered — the fireless sacrifice. 

Fire, it has been seen, was used in the Homeric burnt sacrifice 
for sublimation. By fire, Eustathius- says in speaking of the 
burning of the dead among the northern nations, ' the divine 
element was borne on high as though in a chariot and mingled 
with the heavenly beings.' In like fashion we may suppose the 
burnt victim was freed from the grosser elements and in purified 
vaporous form ascended to the gods of the upper air. This is 
what Porphyry •' means when he says that in burnt sacrifice we 
'immortalize the dues of the heavenly gods by means of fire.' Fire 
again in the service of the underworld gods was used, it has 
further been seen, for utter destruction, for the holocaust. But 
in certain rituals established, it may be, before the discovery of 
fire, it was definitely prescribed that the sacrifice should be fireless. 
Diogenes Laertius^ relates that according to tradition there was 
but one altar in Delos at which Pythagoras could worship, the 
'Altar (»f Apollo the Sire,' wiiich stood behind the great Altar of 

' Some further points as to the Nephalia will be considered in roluticm to 
the Eleusinian ritual (p. 150), and the Orphic mysterieH (Chai)tor x.). 

2 Eustatli. ad //. i. 52. For a full discusBion of the purport of cremation 
see Prof, llidf^eway, Karlij Age of Greece i. p. 540. 

^ Polish, de Abu. ii. 5. •• Diog. Laert. vin. 13. 



94 Harvest Festivals [ch. 

the Horns, because on this altar wheat and barley and cakes are 
the only offering laid and the sacrifice is without fire and there 
is no sacrificial victim — so Aristotle stated in his Constitution of 
the Delicms. This altar was also known as the Altar of the Pious. 
The foundation of the great blood-stained Altar of the Horns may 
still be seen in Delos ; the primitive Altar of the Sire has left no 
trace, but in some bygone time a voice, it would seem, had been 
heard on Mount Cynthus saying, ' Thou shalt not hurt nor destroy 
in all my Holy Mountain.' 

What ancient worship of a ' Sire ' Apollo had taken to himself 
in Delos we do not know, but in remote Arcadia a fireless sacrifice 
of a specially simple kind went on right down to the time of 
Pausanias^ in honour of a home-grown goddess, Demeter. At 
Phigalia Pausanias visited the cave-sanctuary of the Black 
Demeter; indeed he says in his pious way it was chiefly for her 
sake that he went to Phigalia, and he adds ' 1 sacrificed no victim 
to the goddess, such being the custom of the people of the country. 
They bring instead as offerings the fruit (jf the vine and of other 
trees they cultivate, and honey-combs and wool which is still 
unwrought and full of the natural grease ; these they lay on the 
altar which is set up in front of the cave, and having laid them 
there they pour on them olive oil. Such is the rite of sacrifice 
observed by private persons and once a year by the Phigalian 
people collectively.' Everything here prescribed is in its most 
natural form, grapes rather than wine, honey-comb rather than 
honey, unwrought wool not artificial fillets, and the service is 
fireless. It was a service to content even Pythagoras. 

That there was between the early fireless sacrifice and the 
burnt sacrifice of the Olympian in some prehistoric time a rivalry 
and clashing of interests, is clear from the Rhodian tradition of 
the Heliadae. Pindar - tells how : 

' Up to the hill they came, 
Yet in their hand 
No seed of burning flame, 

And for the Rhodian land 
With fireless rite 
The grove upon the citadel they dight.' 

And the scholiast commenting on the passage says : ' The 
Rhodians going up to the Acropolis to sacrifice to Athene, forgot 

1 P. VIII. 42. 5. 2 pin(j_ Qi Yii. 47, schol. ad loc. 



I 



in] The Fhannalos 95 

to take fire with them for their offerings (evaycafiaa-t) and made 
a fireless sacrifice. Hence it came about that, as the Athenians 
were the first to sacrifice by fire, Athene thought it best to live 
with them.' Athene was always a prudent goddess, ready to swim 
with the tide; she was 'all for the father,' all for the Olympians, 
and she had her reward. Philostratos^ tells the same story with 
something more of emphasis. He contrasts the Acropolis of 
Athens and the Acropolis of Rhodes ; the Rhodians had only 
a fireless cheap service, the people of Athens provide the savour of 
burnt sacrifice and fragrant smoke ; the goddess went to live with 
them because ' they were wiser in their generation (aocpwrepovi) 
and good at sacrificing.' From Diodorus"-^ we learn that it was 
Cecrops who introduced the fire-sacrifice at Athens, On Cecrops 
were fathered many of the innovations of civilized life, among 
them marriage. He was halfway between the old and the new, 
half civilized man, half snake. He, Pausanias^ significantly tells 
us, was the first to give to Zeus the name of the Highest. He too 
became all for the Olympian. 

These forms of primitive sacrifice — the pelanos, the barley 
grains, the 7iephalia, the fireless rites — have been considered at 
some length because, though in part they went over to the 
Olympians, they remain broadly speaking and in their simplest 
forms characteristic of the lower stratum and of the worship of 
underworld spirits. Moreover it is these primitive rites which 
were, as will later be seen, taken up and mysticized by the religion 
of Orpheus. 

It remains to consider the second and by far the most im- 
portant element in the harvest festival of the Thargelia, the 
ceremony of the Pharmakos. 



The Pharmakos. 

That the leading out of the pharmakos was a part of the 
festival of the Thargelia we know from Harpocration •*. He says 
in commenting on the word: 'At Athens they led out two men 
to 1)0 purifications for the city ; it was at the Thargelia, one was 

» Pbilostrat. Jvik. u. 27 § 852. ^ Diod. v. oC. 

" 1'. viii. 2. 2. •* Harpociat. s.v. <papixaK6i. 



96 Harvest Festivals [ch. 

for the men and the other for the women.' These men, these 
pharmakoi, whose function it was to purify the city, were, it will 
later be seen, in all probability put to death, but the expression 
used by Harpocration is noteworthy — they were led out. The 
gist of the ceremony is not death but expulsion; death, if it 
occurs, is incidental. 

The ceremony of expulsion took place, it is again practically 
certain, on the 6th day of Thargelion, a day not lightly to be 
forgotten, for it was the birthday of Socrates. Diogenes Laertius^ 
says in his life of Socrates : ' He was born on the 6th day of 
Thargelion, the day when the Athenians purify the city.' The 
pharmakos is not expressly named, but it will be seen in the 
sequel that the cleansing of the city by the expulsion of the 
pharmakos was regarded as tlie typical purification of the whole 
year. The etymology of the word will be best considered when 
the nature of the rites has been examined -. 

The ceremony of the pharmakos has been often discussed, 
but I think frequently and fundamentally misapprehended. It 
appears at first sight to involve what we in our modern termino- 
logy call ' Human Sacrifice.' To be told that this went on in 
civilized Athens in the 5th cent. B.C. shocks our preconceived 
notions of what an Athenian of that time would be likely to do 
or suffer. The result is that we are inclined to get out of the 
difficulty in one of two ways : either we try to relegate the 
ceremony of the pharmakos to the region of prehistoric tradition, 
or we so modify and mollify its main issues as to make it un- 
meaning. 

The issue before us is a double one and must not be confused. 
We have to determine what the ceremonial of the pharmakos was, 
and next, did that ceremonial last on into historic times ? 

My own view is briefly this: that we have no positive evidence 
that it did last on into the 5th century B.C., but that, if the gist 
of the ceremonial is once fairly understood, there is no a priori 
difficulty about its continuance, and that, this a priori difficulty 
being removed, we shall accept an overwhelming probability. 
The evidence for the historical pharmakos is just as good as 

1 Diog. Laert. u. 4. 

2 Classical sources for the phariiuikos are most fully enumerated by Mannhardt, 
Myth. Forschungen, pp. 123, 133. For primitive analogies see Frazer, Golden Bough, 
2nd ed., vol. in. p. 93, from whom I have taken the instances adduced. 



m] The Fharmakos 97 

e.g. the evidence for the chewing of the buckthorn at the 

Anthesteria. 

It should be noted at the outset that the pharmakos, i.e. the 

human scape-goat, though it seems to us a monstrous and horrible 

notion, was one so familiar to the Greek mind as to be in Attic 

literature practically proverbial. Aristophanes^ wants to point 

the contrast between the old mint of sterling state officials 

and the new democratic coinage : he says, now-a-days we fill 

offices by 

' Any chance man that we come across, 
Not fit in old days for a pharmakos, 
These we use 
And these we choose, 
The veriest scum, the mere refuse,' 

and again in a fragment- : 

' Fo^ir kinsman ! how and whence, you pharmakos,' 

and in the Knights^ Demos says to Agoracritos : 

' I bid you take the seat 
In the Prytaneum where this pharmakos 
Was wont to sit.' 

Pharmakos is in fact, like its equivalent ' offscouring ' {Kddap/j,a), 
a current form of utter abuse, disgust and contempt. 

Moreover its ritual import was perfectly familiar. Lysias^ in 
his speech against Andokides is explicit : ' We needs must hold 
that in avenging ourselves and ridding ourselves of Andokides we 
purify the city and perform apotropaic ceremonies, and solemnly 
expel a pharmakos and rid ourselves of a criminal ; for of this 
sort the fellow is.' 

For the fullest details of the horrid ceremony we are indebted 
to a very late author. Tzetzes-^ (a.D. 1150) in his Thousand 

1 Ar. Ran. 734. -^ Ar. frg. 582. » Ar. Eq. 1405. 

* Lys. c. Andok. 108. 4: vvv ovv xpV "Ofii^eiu TifMuipovfjLfi'ovs Kai dwaWaTTo/xii/ovs 
'AvookLoov t7]v Tr6\iv Kadalpeiv Kal dvodioiro/JLTreladai Kai (papfxandv diroTr^/xTrtiv 
Kal d.\LTrjpiov aTraWaTTfadai, tlis If tovtuiv oiVos ecrri. 

^ Fragments of Hipponax (0th cent, is.c.) incorporated by Tzetzes, Hist, 23. 
726—756 : 

Ti rb Kadapfia; 
6 ^apfxaKbi rb Kadapfia roiovrov rjv rb TraXat. 
hv (TVfx<popa Kar^Xafit irbXiv deofxr)vlq., 
elr^ ohv Xi/xbi dre Xoifj.bi eiVe Kal jiXdfioi dXXo, 
Twv irdvTUiv d)J.op()>bTfpov yjyov ws TrpAs Ovcriav 
fis KaOapfj-bv Kai (papfiaKov TroXeojs rrji voaoiiarjs. 
eis rbirov 5i rbv irp6ff<popov CTrjcravTt^ Trjv Bvclav 
Tvpbv T€ obvTes Trj X^V' ''<^' M'^i^"'' ''°' icrxdoas, 
eirrdKis "ykp pairiaavm iKtivov etj rb wios 

H. 7 



98 Harvest Festivals [ch. 

Histories describes it as follows : ' The pharmakos was a purifi- 
cation of this sort of old. If a calamity overtook the city by the 
wrath of God, whether it were famine or pestilence or any other 
mischief, they led forth as though to a sacrifice the most 
unsightly of them all as a purification and a remedy to the 
suffering city. They set the sacrifice in the appointed place, and 
gave him cheese with their hands and a barley cake and figs, and 
seven times they smote him with leeks and wild figs and other 
wild plants. Finally they burnt him with fire with the wood of 
wild trees and scattered the ashes into the sea and to the winds, 
for a purification, as I said, of the suffering city. Just as, 
I think, Lycophron records it of the Locrian maidens, speaking 
somewhat after this manner, I do not remember the exact verse, 
" when, having consumed their limbs with fuel from fruitless trees, 
the flame of fire cast into the sea the ashes of the maidens that 
died on the hill of Traron." ' 

Tzetzes is not inventing the ceremonies, and in his awkward 
confused way he goes on to tell us his source — the iambic poet 
Hippouax. ' And Hipponax gives us the best complete account 
of the custom when he says, " to purify the city and strike (the 
pharmakos) witli branches" \ and in another place he says in his 
first iambic poem, " striking him in the meadow and heating him 
luith branches and with leeks like a pharmakos" ; and again in other 
places he says as follows : " we must make of him a phai'makos " ; 
and he says, " offering him figs and a barley cake and cheese sucJi as 
pharmakoi eat " ; and " they have long been waiting agape for them, 
holding branches in their hands as pharmakoi do " ; and some- 

(TKiWais, crvKati dypiais re Kal dWois twv dypiwv, 
t4\os TTvpi KariKaiou iv ^vXois tois dy plots, 
Koi Tov (nrodbv els dcCkaaaav ipponvov Kal dve/xovs 
Kal Kadap/xbv ttjs TroXews tbs ^^t/j* ttjs poffovarjs. 

6 5e 'iTTirtDya^ dpurra avp-wav to ^dos \eyei 

1 TToXiv Kadalpeiv Kal Kpad-rjai jBdWeadai {(papfJ-aKov) , 
Kal dWaxov 8^ ttov (prjai TrpuiTqi Idp-fSu) ypd(pwv 

2 jSdWovTes ev Xei/xQvi Kal pairi'^ovTes 
Kpddrjcri Kal a KlWrjaiv Cbairep (papfxaKov. 

Kal irdXiv ctWois tottols Oe ravrd (prjOL kut' iwos 

3 Set 5' avrbv is (papixaKov iKvoiifcracrdac. 

4 K&<f>7} irapi^eiv iaxddas re Kal fj.d^av 
Kal Tvpbv olov iffOlovcn. (papfjLaKol. 

5 TrdXat yap avTovs 7r/>ocr5exoi'Ta(t) x'^''''^^'''^^^ 
Kpddas ^x""'''^^ '•'S ^xoi'ct (papfxaKoL 

Kal dWaxoG 8i irou (prjcriv iv tui avrw idfxjiij} 

6 Xi/J.(^ yivTjTai. ^rjpbs (is iu rip 6v/j.ip 
(papfxaKbs dx^ets errrdKis pairicrdeir). 



m] The Pharmakos 99 

where else he says in the same iambic poem, " may he be parched 
with hunger, so that in (their) anger he may be led as pharmakos 
and beaten seven times." ' 

Tzetzes quotes for us six fragmentary statements from 
Hipponax, and the words of Hipponax correspond so closely in 
every detail with his own account that we are justified in sup- 
posing that his account of the end of the ceremonial, the burning 
and scattering of the ashes, is also borrowed ; but the evidence of 
this from Hipponax he omits. 

Hipponax makes his statements apparently, not from any 
abstract interest in ritual, but as part of an insult levelled at his 
enemy Boupalos. This is made almost certain by another frag- 
ment of Hipponax^ in which he says, 'as they uttered impreca- 
tions against that abomination (a^os-) Boupalos.' The fragments 
belong obviously to one or more iambic poems in which Hipponax 
expresses the hope that Boupalos will share the fate of a phar- 
makos, will be insulted, beaten, driven out of the city, and at last 
presumably put to death. Hipponax is not describing an actual 
historical ceremony, but to make his insults have any point he 
must have been alluding to a ritual that was, in the 6th century B.C., 
perfectly familiar to his hearers. 

Some of the statements of Hipponax as to the details of the 
ritual are confirmed from other sources, and are given in these 
with certain slight variations which seem to show that Hipponax 
was not the only source of information. 

Helladius'* the Byzantine, quoted by Photius, says that ' it was 
the custom at Athens to lead in procession two pharmakoi with 
a view to purification ; one for the men, one for the women. The 
pharmakos of the men had black figs round his neck, the other 
had white ones, and he says they were called av^aK^oi.' Helladius 
added that ' this purification was of the nature of an apotropaic 
ceremony to avert diseases, and that it took its rise from An- 
drogeos the Cretan, when at Athens the Athenians suffered 
abnormally from a pestilential disease, and the custom obtained 
of constantly purifying the city by pharmakoi.' 

The man and woman and the black and white figs are variant 
details. Helladius is our sole authority for the curious name 

' Hippon. frg. 11 (4) ws ol /xiv ayti UovtrdXcp KarrjpwvTO. 
2 He-Had. ap. Phot. nibl. c. '27'.), p. 5H4. 

7—2 



100 Harvest Festivals [ch. 

av^aK^ot ■ what this means is not certain ^ The term may have 
meant ' pig-Bacchoi.' The Baechoi, as will later be seen, were 
sacred and specially purified persons with magical powers, and 
the term may have been applied to mark analogous functions. 
Crete was the home of ceremonies of purification. 

Harpocration, in the passage already quoted, confirms the 
view that there were two pharmakoi, but he says they were both 
men : one for the women, one for the men. The discrepancy is 
not serious. It would be quite easy if necessary to dress up 
a man as a woman, and even a string of white figs would be 
sufficient presentment of gender ; simulata pro verts is a principle 
of wide acceptation in primitive ritual. 

The beating of the pharmakoi was a point of cardinal im- 
portance. It was a ceremonial affair and done to the sound of 
the flute. Hesychius- says, ' The song of the branches is a 
measure that they play on the flute when the pharmakoi are 
expelled, they being beaten with branches and fig sprigs. The 
pharmakos was actually called " he of the branches." ' It must 
have been a matter of very early observation that beating is 
expulsive. You beat a bush, a bird escapes ; you beat a garment, 
the dust comes out ; you beat a man, the evil, whatever it be, will 
surely emerge. We associate beating with moral stimulus, but 
the first notion is clearly expulsive. 

Probably some notion of the application or instigation of 
good as well as the expulsion of evil early came in. This may be 
conjectured from the fact that rods made of special plants and 
trees were used, notably leeks and fig-trees. Plants with strong 
smells, and plants the eating of which is purgative, are naturally 
regarded as ' good medicine ' ; as expulsive of evil, and heoce in 
a secondary way as promotive of good. 

Pythagoras'' taught that to have a leek hung up over a door- 
way was a good thing to prevent the entrance of evil, and 
Dioscorides^ records the same belief. Lucian"^ makes Menippus 

1 Lewy, Semitische Fremdworter, p. 256, suggests that crv^&Kxot. is from D"*n2T 
z'bdhim, the plural of U^l which occurs in Phenician. If so the form av^aKxoi. 
would be due to popular etymology. 

- Hesych. s.v. Kpadli^s vofios. * pjjn. N.H. xx. 9. 39. 

* Diosc. tie mat. mcd. ii. 202. 

® Luc. Nek. 7 eKadrjpi re /j.e /cat dir^fia^e /cat irepn^yviffe 5q.diois kuI (TKiWrj. 



Ill] The FharmaAos 101 

relate how before he was allowed to consult the oracle of the dead he 

was 'purged and wiped clean and consecrated with leek and torches.' 

The locus classicus on beating with leek is of course the 

beating of the god Pan by his Arcadian worshippers. Theocritus^ 

makes Simichidas sing : 

' Dear Pan, if this my prayer may granted be 
Then never shall the boys of Arcady 
Flog thee on back and flank with leeks that sting 
When scanty meat is left for offering ; 
If not, thy skin with nails be flayed tind torn 
And amid nettles mayst thou couch till morn.' 

And the scholiast remarks, ' they say that a festival was held in 
Arcadia in which the youths beat Pan with leeks when the 
officials sacrificed a small victim, and there was not enough to eat 
for the worshipper ; or the Arcadians when they went out hunting 
if they had good sport paid honour to Pan ; if the reverse they 
maltreated him with leeks because, being a mountain god, he had 
power over the produce of the chase.' The first explanation 
confuses cause with effect, the second is undoubtedly right. Pan 
is beaten because, as lord of the chase, he has failed to do his business. 

It is sometimes said that Pan is beaten, and the pharmakoi 
beaten, in order to ' stimulate their powers of fertility.' In a sense 
this is ultimately true, but such a statement gives a false and 
misleading emphasis. The image and the pharmakoi are beaten 
partly to drive out evil influences, partly, it should not be for- 
gotten, to relieve the feelings of the beaters. When the evil 
influences are beaten out, the god will undoubtedly do better 
next time, but it is only in this sense that the powers of fertility 
are stimulated. The pharmakos has no second chance. He is 
utterly impure, so that the more purifying influences, the more 
good medicine brought to bear upon him, the better; but he is 
doomed to death, not to reform. In the Lupercalia, already 
discussed (p. 51), the women are struck by the fehruum as a 
fertility charm, but even here the primary notion must have been 
the expulsion of evil influences. 

The beating, like the pharmakos, became proverbial. Aristo- 
phanes- makes Aeacus ask how he is to torture the supposed 
Xanthias, and the real Xanthias makes answer : 

' Oh, in the usual way, but when you l)cat him 
Don't d(i it with a leek or a young onion.' 

1 Theocr. Id. vii. 104, schol. ad loc. " Ar. Ran. 020. 



102 Harvest Festivals [oh. 

Here undoubtedly the meaning is, 'don't let this be a merely 
ceremonial beating, a religious performance,' and the allusion 
gains in point by the fact that the supposed slave was a real god 
to be treated worse than a pharmakos. Lucian^ says that the 
Muses, he is sure, would never deign to come near his vulgar book- 
buyer, and instead of giving him a crown of myrtle they will beat 
him with myrrh and mallow and get rid of him, so that he may 
not pollute their sacred fountains. Clearly here the vulgar book- 
buyer is a pharmakos. 

We have then abundant evidence that the pharmakos was 
beaten ; was he also put to death ? Tzetzes, as has been seen, 
states that he was burnt with the wood of certain fruitless trees, 
and that his ashes were scattered to the sea and the Avinds. 
The scholiast on Aristophanes- also states expressly that by 
BrjfjLoaioc, i.e. people fed and kept at the public expense, was 
meant ' those who were called pharmakoi, and these pharmakoi 
purified cities by their slaughter.' So far it need not have been 
inferred that he was speaking of Athens, but he goes on, ' for the 
Athenians maintained certain very ignoble and useless persons, and 
on the occasion of any calamity befalling the city, I mean a pestilence 
or anything of that sort, they sacrificed these persons with a view 
to purification from pollution and they called them purifications ' 
{KaOapixaTo). Tzetzes said a pharmakos was excessively ungainly 
(d/ji,op(f}6Tepov), the scholiast, worthless and useless. 

The scholiast is of course a late and somewhat dubious authority, 
and did the fact of the death of the pharmakos rest on him and 
on Tzetzes alone, we might be inclined to question it. A better 
authority is preserved for us by Harpocration'' ; he says, ' Istros 
(circ. B.C. 230), in the first book of his Epiphanies of Apollo, says 
that Pharmakos is a proper name, and that Pharmakos stole sacred 
phialae belonging to Apollo, and was taken and stoned by the 
men with Achilles, and the ceremonies done at the Thargelia are 
mimetic representations of these things.' The aetiology of Istros 

1 Luc. Indoct. 1. - Schol. ad Ar. Eq. 1136. 

^ Harpocrat. s.v. (papfiaK6s' 6tl 8^ ovofxa Kvpibv ianv 6 <f>apij.aK6s, iepas Se (pid\as 
Tov ' AttSWiovos K\^\pa$ Kal dXous inrb tujv irepl rbv 'A^iXX^a KareXfvadrj, Kai to. Totj 
QapyriXioLS ayofieua tovtwv dTro/j.Lfji.7)/j.aTd iariv, "Icrrpos ev wpdiTix) tQv 'AttoWcovos 
i-n-KpaveLwu dpTjKev. On the mythological gist of this legend and its possible con- 
nection with the epic Thersites see H. Usener, "Der Stoff d. gr. Epos," Sitzinigsher. 
d. Phil. Hist. kl. d. k. Ak. d. Wissenschaften, Band 137, 1898, Wien, p. 47. 



ni] The Pharmakos 103 

is of course wrong, but it is quite clear that he believed the 
ceremonies of the Thargelia to include the stoning of a man to 
death. 

That in primitive pharmakos-ceremonies the human phar- 
makos was actually put to death scarcely admits of doubt : that 
Istros believed this took place at the ceremony of the Thargelia in 
honour of Apollo may be inferred from his aetiology. There still 
remains in the minds of some a feeling that the Athens of the 
fifth century was too civilized a place to have suffered the 
actual death of human victims, and that periodically, as part of 
a public state ritual. This misgiving arises mainly, as was indi- 
cated at the outset, from a misunderstanding of the gist of the 
ceremony. Tzetzes, after the manner of his day, calls it a dvala, 
a burnt sacrifice ; but it was not really a sacrifice in our modern 
sense at all, though, as will later be shown, it was one of the 
diverse notions that went to the making of the ancient idea of 
sacrifice. 

The pharmakos was not a sacrifice in the sense of an offering 
made to appease an angry god. It came to be associated with 
Apollo when he took over the Thargelia, but primarily it was not 
intended to please or to appease any spirit or god. It was, as 
ancient authors repeatedly insist, a Kadapfiofi, a purification. The 
essence of the ritual was not atonement, for there was no one to 
atone, but riddance, the artificial making of an 0^709, a pollution, 
to get rid of all pollution. The notion, so foreign to our scientific 
habit of thought, so familiar to the ancients, was that evil of all 
kinds was a physical infection that could be caught and trans- 
ferred ; it was highly catching. Next, some logical savage saw 
that the notion could be utilized for artificial riddance. The 
Dyaks' sweep misfortunes out of their houses and put them into 
a toy-house made of bamboo ; this they set adrift on a river. On 
the occasion of a recent outbreak of influenza in Pithuria 'a man had 
a small carriage made, after a plan of his own, for a pair of scape- 
goats which were harnessed to it and driven to a wood at .some 
distance where they were let loose. From that hour the disease 
completely ceased in the town. The goats never returned ; had 
they done so the disease must have come back with ilimi. it 

' For these modern savage analogies and many others see JDr Frazer, (ialden 
Bough, 2nd ed., vol. ni. p. 93. 



104 Harvest Festivals [ch. 

is needless for our purpose to accumulate instances of the count- 
less varieties of scape-goats, carts, cocks, boats, that the ingenuity 
of primitive man has invented. The instance chosen shows as 
clearly as possible that, as the gist of the ceremony is magical 
riddance, it is essential that the scape-goat, whatever form he 
takes, should never return. 

This necessity for utter destruction comes out very clearly in 
an account of the way the Egyptians treated their scape-goats. 
Plutarch 1 in his discourse on Isis and Osiris says, on the authority 
of Manetho, that in the, dog-days they used to burn men alive 
whom they called Typhonians, and their ashes they made away 
with by winnowing and scattering them. The winnowing-fan in 
which the corn was tossed and by means of which the chaff was 
blown utterly away was to Clement of Alexandria- the symbol of 
utter ruin and destruction. In his protest against the ruinous 
force of convention among pagan people, he says finely : ' let us 
fly from convention, it strangles men, it turns them away from 
truth, it leads them afar from life ; convention is a noose, a place 
of execution, a pit, a winnowing-fan ; convention is ruin.' 

The pharmakos is killed then, not because his death is a 
vicarious sacrifice, but because he is so infected and tabooed that 
his life is a practical impossibility. The uneducated, among whom 
his lot would necessarily be cast, regard him as an infected horror, 
an incarnate pollution ; the educated who believe no such nonsense 
know that the kindest thing is to put an end to a life that is 
worse than death. Moreover nearly every civilized state to this 
day offers 'human sacrifice' in the shape of the criminals it executes. 
Why not combine religious tradition with a supposed judicial 
necessity ? Civilized Athens had its barathron ; why should 
civilized Athens shrink from annually utilizing two vicious and 
already condemned criminals to ' purify the city ' ? 

The question of whether the pharmakos was actually put to 
death in civilized Athens is of course for our purpose a strictly 
subordinate one. It has only been discussed in detail because the 
answer that we return to it depends in great measure on how 

1 Plut. de Is. et Os. lxxiii. j'wi'Tas dvdp(JoTrov? KaTeirliXTvpaaav cos Mavedlis laTop-qKe 
Tv<f>wviovs KaXoOires Kai ttjv ricppav airCiv XiK/muivTes rjcpavi'^ov koX SUaweipov. 

- Clem. Al. Protr. xii. 118 (pvywfjLei> oCu t7)c ffvvrjOeLav . . .dyxei rbv avdpwirov, t^j 
dXrj^eias airoTpeiret., aira/yu ttjs j'wtjs, Trdyii iarlv ^dpaOpdv eari-v ^6Bpos earl XiKvov 
€(ttLv, KUKhv T] (Tvvrjdeia. 



Ill] The Pliannal'os 105 

far we realize the primary gist of a pharmakos, i.e. the two notions 
of (a) the physicalness, the actuality of evil, and {h) the possibility 
of contagion and transfer. 

Our whole modern conception of the scape-man is apt to 
be unduly influenced by the familiar instance of the Hebrew scape- 
goat. We remember how 

' Tlie scape-goat stood all skin and bone 
While moral business, not his oivn, 
Was bound about his head.' 

And the pathos of the proceeding haunts our minds and prevents 
us from realizing the actuality and the practicality of the more 
primitive physical taboo. It is interesting to note that even in 
this moralized Hebrew conception, the scape-goat was not a 
sacrifice proper ; its sending away was preceded hy sacrifice. The 
priest ' made an atonement for the children of Israel for all their 
sins once a year,' and when the sacrifice of bullock and goat and 
the burning of incense, and the sprinkling of blood was over, then 
and not till then the live goat was presented to the Lord \ The 
Hebrew scriptures emphasize the fact that the burden laid upon 
the goat is not merely physical evil, not pestilence or famine, but 
rather the burden of moral guilt. 'And Aaron shall lay both his 
hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over him all the 
iniquities of the children of Israel and all their transgressions in 
all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall 
send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness. And 
the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities into a land not 
inhabited.' 

But so close is the connection of moral and physical that 
even here, where the evil laid upon the scape-goat is moral only, 
there is evident danger of infection ; the goat is sent forth into 
a land not inhabited and it would be manifestly undesirable that 
he should return. At Athens we hear of no confession of sins, it 
is famine and pestilence from which a terror-stricken city seeks 
riddance. 

This physical aspect of evil is still more clearly brought out 
in a ceremony performed annually at Chaeronea. Plutarch - him- 
self, when he was archon, had to preside over the ritual and has 

' Lev. xvi. 21, and for the Egyptian scape-animal .see Herod, ii. 3'J. 
2 Plut. Q. Symj). vi. 8. 



106 Harvest Festivals [ch. 

left us the account. A household slave was taken and ceremonially 
beaten with rods of agnus castas — again a plant of cathartic 
quality — and driven out of doors to the words, 'Out with hunger, in 
with wealth and health.' The ceremony was called the ' expulsion 
of hunger,' and Plutarch speaks of it as an 'ancestral sacrifice.' It 
was performed by each householder for his own house, and by the 
archon for the common hearth of the city. When Plutarch was 
archon he tells us the ceremony was largely attended. The name 
of the ' ceremony ' is instructive, it is ef eA,ao-t<?, riddance, ex- 
pulsion, not as the pharmakos was, Kadapfio'i, purification ; both 
are called Oualai., sacrifices, only by concession to popular usage 
when every religious ceremony is regarded as of the nature of 
burnt sacrifice. The ceremony of the pharmakos was taken on by 
Apollo, but in the Chaeronea ' expulsion ' there is no pretence that 
any god is worshipped ; the performance remains frankly magical. 
At Chaeronea the slave was merely beaten and expelled. At 
Delphi a pharmakos ceremony of still milder form took place in 
which the victim was merely a puppet. 

In his 12th Greek Question Plutarch asks, ' What is Charila 
among the Delphians?' His answer is as follows: 'Concerning 
Charila they tell a story something on this wise. The Delphians 
were afflicted by a famine following after a drought. They came 
to the gates of the king's palace with their children and their 
wives to make supplication. And the king distributed grain and 
pulse to the noblest of them as there was not enough for all. 
And there came a little girl who had lost both her father and 
mother, and she made supplication. But he struck her with his 
shoe and threw thB shoe into her face. Now she was poor and 
desolate but of noble spirit, and she went away and loosed her 
girdle and hanged herself As the famine went on and pestilence 
was added thereto, the Pythia gave an oracle to the king that he 
must appease Charila, a maiden who had died by her own hand. 
After some difficulty they found out that this was the name of 
the girl who had been struck. So they performed a sacrifice 
which had in it some admixture of a purification, and this they 
still perform every nine years.' 

The tale told of Charila is, of course, pure aetiology, to account 
for certain features in an established ritual. The expression 



Ill] Charila 107 

Plutarch uses, a ' sacrifice with admixture of pui-ification ' (fiefity- 
/jl,€V7]v rtva KaOap/xov OucrLav), is interesting because it shows that 
though by his time ahnost every rehgious ceremony was called 
a Ovaia, his mind is haunted by the feeling that the Charila 
ceremony was m reality a purification, a KaOap/xo^;; he would have 
been nearer the truth had he said it was a 'purification containing 
in it a certain element of sacrifice.' 

He then proceeds to give the actual ritual. ' The king is 
seated to preside over the pulse and the grain and he distributes 
it to all, both citizens and strangers: there is brought in an image 
of Charila as a little girl, and when they all receive the corn, the 
king strikes the image with his shoe and the leader of the 
Thyiades takes the image and conducts it to a certain cavernous 
place, and there fastening (a rope) round the neck of the image 
they bury it where they buried the strangled Charila.' 

The festival Charila, festival of rejoicing and grace, is like the 
Thargelia, a festival of first-fruits containing the ceremony of the 
Pharmakos, only in effigy. Charila is beaten with a shoe : leather 
is to this day regarded as magically expulsive, though the modern 
surrogate is of white satin. On a curious vase in the National 
Museum at Athens', we have a representation of a wedding 
procession at which a man is in the act of throwing a shoe. It is 
still to-day regarded as desirable that bride and bridegroom 
should be hit, evil influences are thereby expelled, and the shower 
of fertilizing rice is made the more efficacious. The effigy of 
Charila is buried, not burnt, possibly a more primitive form of 
destruction. The origin of the ceremony is dated back to the time 
when the king was priest, but the actual celebrants are women. 

A pharmakos ceremony that is known to have taken place at 
Marseilles adds some further instructive details. Servius, in com- 
menting on the words auri sacra fames'- 'accursed hunger of gold,' 
notes that sace7' may mean accursed as well as holy, and he seems, 
rather vaguely, to realize that between these two meanings is the 

' My attention was kindly drawn to this vase by M. Perdrizet, see lixtlu-mcria 
Arch. UiOiJ, pi. G, 7, and Pj. Samter, Hochzfitiil/riiuclic' in Neite Jalirbiicher f. Kl. 
Altcrtum, I'.tOV, xix. p. VM. Suidas (s.v. eidwXof) seems to refer to the Cluuila 
ceremony, KeXeuti 17 \lv0ia eiou}\6v ti TreTrXaff/jL^vov els 6\f/iv yvuaiKbs fiiTiojpov (^aprau 
Kul avippwcrdrj ij TrdXis. For this and the oscilla ceremonies and the analo^'y of 
Artemis dr ay xo/J-^fr) (P. viii. 2'ii. 7) see Lobeck, Af/looph. p. 175. The beatiiiK of 
the female slavt; in tlie tenijjle of Leucothea (Pint. (,). It. xvi.) seems to have been 
Vjawed on a racial taboo, but a (papixaK6s ceremony may underlie it. 

'^ Serv. ad Verg. Aen. in. 75. 



108 Harvest Festivals [ch. 

middle term ' devoted.' The use of the term, he says, is derived 
from a custom among the Gauls: 'Whenever the inhabitants of 
Marseilles suffer from a pestilence, one of the poorer class offers 
himself to be kept at the public expense and fed on specially pure 
foods. After this has been done he is decorated with sacred 
boughs and clad in holy garments, and led about through the 
whole city to the accompaniment of curses, in order that upon 
him may fall all the ills of the whole city, and thus he is cast 
headlong down.' 

Here we have the curious added touch that the vehicle of 
impurity is purified. To our modern minds pure and impure 
stand at two opposite poles, and if we were arraying a scape-goat 
we certainly should not trouble about his preliminary purification. 
But the ancients, as Servius dimly feels, knew of a condition that 
combined the two, the condition that the savage describes as 
' taboo.' For this condition the Latins used the word ' sacer,' the 
Greeks, as has already been seen, the word d'yo<;. It is in such 
complex primitive notions as those of sacer and 01709, that our 
modern habit of clear analysis and differentiation causes us to 
miss the full and complex significance. 

The leading out of the pharmakos is then a purely magical 
ceremony based on ignorance and fear; it is not a human sacrifice 
to Apollo or to any other divinity or even ghost, it is a ceremony 
of physical expulsion. It is satisfactory to find that the etymology^ 
of the word confirms this view, (l)ap/jLa/c6<; means simply ' magic- 
man.' Its Lithuanian cognate is hiirin, magic; in Latin it appears 
as forma, formula, magical spell ; our formulari/ retains some 
vestige of its primitive connotation, ^apfiavov in Greek means 
healing drug, poison, and dye, but all, for better for worse, are 
magical. To express its meaning we need what our language has 
lost, a double-edged word like the savage ' medicine.' The phar- 
makos of the Thargelia shoAvs us a state of things in which man 
does not either tend or avert god^ or ghost, but seeks, by the 

^ For a full and very interesting discussion of the etymology and meaning of 
(papfiaKos, see Osthoff, 'AUerhand Zauber etymologisch beleuchtet,' Bezzenberger, 
Beitrdge xxiv. p. 109. As to the accentuation of the word (papixaKbs Eustathius 
(1935. 15) notes that it was proparoxytone ' among the lonians.' 

2 As to the god worshipped at the Thargelia it is probable that when godhead 
came to be formulated Demeter Chloe long preceded Apollo. Diogenes Laertius 
(ii. 44) notes that on the sixth day of Thargelion when the Athenians purified the 
city, sacrifice was done to Demeter Chloe. Here as elsewhere Apollo took over the 
worship of an Eartli-goddess. 



m] Human Sacrifice 109 

' mediciue ' he himself makes, to do, on his own account, his spring 
or rather Whitsuntide ' thorough cleaning.' The ceremony of the 
pharmakos went in some sense to the making of the Greek and 
modern notion of sacrifice, but the word itself has other and 
perhaps more primitive connotations. 

Tzetzes, looking back at the ceremony of the expulsion of the 
pharmakos, calls it a sacrifice {dvaia), but we need not imitate 
him in his confusion of ideas new and old. The rite of the 
Thargelia was a rite of expulsion, of riddance, which incidentally, 
as it were, involved loss of life to a human being. The result is, 
indeed, in both cases the same to the human beings but the two 
ceremonials of sacrifice and riddance express widely different 
conditions and sentiments in the mind of the worshipper. 

It may indeed be doubted whether we have any certain 
evidence of 'human sacrifice' in our sense among the Greeks even 
of mythological days. A large number of cases which were by the 
traofedians regarded as such, resolve themselves into cases of the 
blood feud, cases such as those of Iphigeneia and Polyxena, when 
the object was really the placation of a ghost, not the service of 
an Olympian. Perhaps a still larger number are primarily not 
sacrifices, dvalai, but ceremonies of riddance and purification, 
KadapfjLoi. The ultimate fact that lies behind such ceremonies is 
the use of a human pharmakos, and then later, when the real 
meaning was lost, all manner of aetiological myths are invented 
and some offended Olympian is introduced. 

The case of the supposed ' human sacrifice ' of Athamas is 
instructive, both as to its original content and as to the shifting 
sentiments with which it was regarded. When Xerxes came to 
Alos in Achaia his guides, Herodotus^ tells us, anxious to give 
him all po.ssible information as to local curiosities, told him the 
tradition about the sanctuary of Zeus Laphystios : ' The eldest of 
the race of Athamas is forbidden to enter the Prytaneion which is 
called by the Achaians the Le'iton. If he enters he can only go 
out to be sacrificed.' It was further told how some, fearing this 
fate, had fled the country, and coming back and entering the 
Prytaneion were decked with fillets and led out in procession to be 

1 Herod, vii. VM. 



110 Harvest Festivals [ch. 

sacrificed {w<; Overat re i^rjyeovro a-refifiacn 7rd<; TTVKacrdel^; koI w? 
avv TTOfXTrrj i^a^Oel<;). Here there is obvious confusion, as the 
man who left the country to avoid death would never have been 
so foolish as, immediately on his return, to enter the forbidden 
place. The point is clear : great stress is laid on the leading 
forth in procession — the descendant of the royal race was a scape- 
goat. Herodotus makes this quite clear. Athamas was sacrificed 
because the Achaeans wei-e making a purification of the land 
{KaOap/ubov T?}? ')^(oprj<i iroiev pievoiv Xy^aioiv). Herodotus gives as 
the cause of this primitive and perfectly intelligible custom 
various conflicting reasons which well reflect the various stages of 
opinion through w^hich the thinking Greek passed. We have first 
the real reason — Athamas as a scape-goat. Then the public 
conscience is uneasy, and we have a legend that the ' sacrifice ' is 
interrupted at the moment of consummation either by Herakles 
(according to Sophocles in the lost Athamas) or by Kytissoros. It 
is wrong to sacrifice ; hence the sacrifice is interrupted, but it is 
wrong to interrupt sacrifice, so the descendants of Kytissoros are 
punished. Then, finally, it is felt that the sacrifice must go on, 
but it is a dreadful thing, an ayo'^, so a chance of escape is given 
to the victim. Finally in the same complex legend we have the 
substitution of a ram for the human victim Phrixos, 

Sometimes incidentally we learn that other peoples adopted 
the device which may have satisfied the Athenians, i.e. needing a 
pharmakos they utilized a man already condemned by the state. 
Thus in the long list of ' human sacrifices ' drawn up by Porphyry^ 
in his indictment of human ignorance and fear he mentions that 
on the 6th day of the month Metageitnion a man was sacrificed to 
Kronos, a custom, he says, which was maintained for a long time 
unchanged. A man who had been publicly condemned to death 
was kept till the time of the festival of Kronia. When the 
festival came they brought him outside the gates before the 
image (eSovi) of Aristobule, gave him wine to drink and slew him. 
The victim is already doomed, and it would seem intoxicated 
before he is sacrificed. 

In noting the substitution of animal for human sacrifice, one 
curious point remains to be observed. The step seems to us 
momentous because to us liuman life is sacrosanct. But to the 

1 Porphyr. de Abst. ii. 53—56. 



Ill] The Bouplionia 111 

primitive mind the gulf between animal and human is not so wide. 
The larger animals, and certain animals which for various reasons 
were specially venerated, were in early days also regarded as sacro- 
sanct, and to slay them was murder, to be atoned for by 
purification. 

This notion comes out very clearly in the ritual of the Murder 
of the Ox, the Bouphonia \ or, as it was sometimes called, the 
Dipolia-. The Bouphonia by the time of Aristophanes^ was 
a symbol of what was archaic and obsolete. After the Just Logos 
in the Clouds has described the austere old educational regime of 
ancient Athens, the Unjust Logos remarks : 

' Bless iiie, that's quite the ancient lot Dipolia-like, chock-full 
Of crickets and Bouphonia too.' 

And the scholiast comments, ' Dipolia, a festival at Athens, in 
which they sacrifice to Zeus Polieus, on the 14th day of Skiro- 
phorion. It is a mimetic representation of what happened about 
the cakes (ireXavui) and the cows^' What happened was this : 
' Barley mixed with wheat, or cakes made of them, was laid upon 
the bronze altar of Zeus Polieus, on the Acropolis. Oxen were 
driven round the altar, and the ox which went up to the altar and 
ate the offering on it was sacrificed. The axe and knife with 
which the beast was slain had been previously wetted with water, 
brought by maidens called " water-carriers." The weapons were 
then sharpened and handed to the butchers, one of whom felled 
the ox with the axe and another cut its throat wdth the knife. As 

' My account of the Bouphonia is taken from Dr Frazer's summary, which is 
exactly based on the complex double account given by Porphj'ry from Tlieophrastos 
(Porphyr. de Abst. u. 29 seq.) and Aelian (V.Il. viii. 3). With Dr Erazer's 
exhaustive commentary {Golden Bouyh, 2nd ed. vol. ii. p. 29.5) I am in substantial 
agreement, save that I do not see in the murdered ox the representative of the 
Corn Spirit. The Bouphonia as o\-)iiurder was first correctly explained by 
Prof. Bobertson Smitli (licliiiion of the Semites, p. 286 ff.). I have discussed it 
previously in Mijtli<ihi<iy and Alomnueiits of Ancient Atliois, p. 421 ff. : see also 
Dr Paul Stengel, llhein. Miis. 1H97, p. 187. With Dr von Prott's view {liliein. Mits. 
1897, p. 187) that the sense of guilt in the sacrifice arises from the fact that the ox 
was the surrogate of a human victim I wholly disagree. 

- It is possible that Dipolia is etymologically not the festival of Zeus Poheus 
but the festival of the Plough Curse, see i^. 23. 

•' Ar. Nub. 984. 

•» The scholiast is (so far as I know) the only authority who gives tlio female 
form. It is possible that the sacrifice may have been priiiiurily to an eartii-godiless 
and hence the animals are female. The curious ceremonial of tlie Clitlionia 
(P. II. 35. 'A) was a similar butchery of cows in honour of Chthonia and presided 
over by ol.i women wlio did tlie actual slaughter, and no man native or foreigner 
was allowed to see it. 



112 Harvest Festivals [ch. 

soon as he had felled the ox, the former threw the axe from him 
and fled, and the man who had cut the beast's throat apparently 
imitated his example. Meantime the ox was skinned and all 
present partook of its flesh. Then the hide was stuffed with 
straw and sewed up, and next the stuffed animal was set on its 
feet and yoked to a plough as if it were ploughing. A trial then 
took place in an ancient law court, presided over by the king (as 
he was called), to determine who had murdered the ox. The 
maidens who had brought the water accused the men who had 
sharpened the axe and knife, the men who had sharpened the axe 
and knife blamed the men who had handed these implements to 
the butchers, the men who had handed the implements to the 
butchers blamed the butchers and the butchers blamed the axe 
and knife, which were accordingly found guilty and condemned 
and cast into the sea.' 

The remarks of the Unjust Logos are amply justified. That a 
mummery so absurd, with all its leisurely House-that-Jack-built 
hocus-pocus, should be regularly carried on in the centre of 
civilized Athens was enough to make the most careless and the 
most conventional reflect on the nature and strength of religious 
conservatism. But the rite was once of real and solemn import, 
and, taken as such, the heart of a terror-stricken service of Aversion. 
The ox had to be killed, man imperatively demanded his feast of 
flesh meat, but it was a dreadful a^o^, an abomination, to kill it, as 
bad as, perhaps worse than killing a man, and the ghost of the ox 
and the spirits of vengeance generally must at all costs be tricked 
or appeased. So great is the terror that no one device is enough. 
You pretend that the ox is not really dead, or at least that he has 
come to life : if that is not enough you pretend that he was him- 
self an offender : he ate the sacred cakes, not by compulsion, but of 
his own free, wicked will. Last you pretend that you did not do 
it yourself, it was some one else. No, not some one else, but some- 
thing else. Finally that thing is got rid of; the d'yo^, the 
pollution, is thrown into the sea. 

The important point for the moment is that the ox, though no 
surrogate for human sacrifice, is as good as human, is a man. 
His murdered ghost, or at least the pollution of his murder, cries 
for placation and purification. It is satisfactory to note that if you 
had to be purified yourself for murdering an ox, an ox, even a 



m] The Stepterlon 113 

bronze ox, had to be purified for murdering you. Pausanias^ was told 
the following story about a bronze ox, dedicated at Olympia by 
the Corcp-eans. A little boy was sitting playing under the ox, 
and suddenly he lifted up his head and broke it against the 
bronze, and a few days after he died of the wounds. The Eleans 
consulted as to whether they should remove the ox out of the 
Altis, as being guilty of blood, but the Delphic oracle, always con- 
servative in the matter of valuable property, ordained ' that they 
were to leave it and perform the same ceremonies as were 
customary among the Greeks in the case of involuntar}^ homicide.' 

To return to the Bouphonia, the confused notion that a thing 
must be done, and yet that its doing involves an a709, a pollution, 
comes out in all the rituals known as Flight-ceremonies. The gist 
of them is very clear in the account given by Diodorus- of the cere- 
monies of embalming among the Egyptians. He tells us ' the man 
called He-who-slits-asunder (Trapaa-^iarT-qs:) takes an Aethiopian 
stone, and, making a slit in the prescribed way, instantly makes 
off with a run, and they pursue him and pelt him with stones, 
and heap curses on him, as though transferring the pollution of the 
thing on to hint,.' 

The Flight-Ceremony recorded by Plutarch'' is specially in- 
structive, and must be noted in detail, the more so as it, like the 
Bouphonia, is connected with rites of the threshing-floor. In his 12th 
Greek Question, Plutarch says that among the three great festivals 
celebrated every eighth year at Delphi was one called Stepterion^, 
and in another discourse (De defect, orac. XIV.) he describes the 
rite practised, though he mixes it up with so much aetiological 
mythology that it is not very easy to disentangle the actual facts. 
This much is clear; every eighth year a hut {KaXidt) was set up 
about the threshing-floor at Delphi. This hut, Plutarch says, bore 
more resemblance to a kingly palace than to a snake's lair; we 

• P. V. 27. 6. 

^ Diod. I. 91 Kadairepel rb fiijffoi eh iKeivov rpeirivTuiv. 

* Plut. De defect, orac. xiv., the text is in places corrupt. 

•» I have elsewhere {J.H.S. xix. 1899, p. 223) stated that the word ' Stepterion ' 
cannot to my thinking' he translated 'Festival of Crowning.' This exjilanation 
rests only on Aelian (Ilixt. An. xii. H4), and purification {KaOapcn^, ^Kdmcs), not 
crowning, is the main gist of the ceremonies. The name Stepterion, is, I suspect, 
connected with the enigmatic critpr) and ariifxiv as occurring in Aesch. t'hoeph. 94, 
Soph. Ant. 431, Elec. 52, 4.58, and means in some way purification, but see Nilsson, 
Griechische Fente, p. l.'il. 

H. 8 



114 Harvest Festivals [ch. 

may therefore safely infer that it held a snake. A boy with both 
his parents alive was led up by a certain prescribed way'^ with 
lighted torches ; fire was set to the hut, a table overturned, and 
the celebrants took flight without looking back through the 
gates of the precinct ; afterwards the boy went off to Tempe, fasted, 
dined, and was brought back crowned with laurel in solemn 
procession. Plutarch never says that the boy killed the snake, but 
as the ceremony was supposed to be a mimetic representation of 
the slaying of the Python and the banishment of Apollo, this may 
be inferred. Plutarch is of course more suo shocked at the idea that 
Apollo could need purification, and at a loss to account decently 
for the curious ceremonial, but he makes one acute remark : 'finally 
the wanderings and the servitude of the boy and the purifications 
at Tempe raise a suspicion of some great pollution and deed of 
daring ' (/jLeydXov tlv6<; dyov<; koX To\,/xr]fjbaro'i vTro^^riav €^ov(tl). 
This hits the mark : a sacred snake has been slain ; the slayer has 
incurred an dyo<i, from which he must be purified. The slaying is 
probably formal and sacrificial, for the boy is led to the hut with 
all due solemnity, and has been carefully selected for the purpose ; 
but the r6\jjir)/j,a, the outrage, the deed of daring, is an dyo<;, so he 
must take flight after its accomplishment. Sacred snake, or 
sacred ox, or human victim, the procedure is the same. 

To resume. The outcome of our examination of the ceremony 
of the pharmakos is briefly this : the gist of the pharmakos rite is 
physical purification, Kadap/u,6<;, and this notion, sometimes alone, 
sometimes combined with the notion of the placation of a ghost, is 
the idea underlying among the Greeks the notion we are apt to 
call Human Sacrifice. To this must be added the fact that in 
a primitive state of civilization the line between human and 
animal ' sacrifice ' is not sharply drawn. 

Kallynteria, Plynteria. 

Plutarch- tells us that it was on a day of ill-omen that 
Alcibiades returned to Athens : ' On the day of his return they 
were solemnizing the Plynteria to the Goddess. For on the sixth 

1 Other instances are given Ael. Hist. An. xii. 34, Philostr. Im. ii. 24. 850. 
For analogous Eoman Festivals see Eegifugium and Poplifugia, Warde-Fowler, 
Roman Festivals, pp. 327 and 174. For the Stepterion and savage analogies see 
Dr Frazer, Pausanias, vol. iii. p. .53. 

2 Plut. Vit. Ale. XXXIV. 



in] Kalhjnteria, Plynteria 115 

day of the third part of Thargelion the Praxiergidae solemnize the 
rites that may not be disclosed : they take off the adornments 
of the image, and cover it up. Hence the Athenians account this 
day as most unlucky of all, and do no work on it. And it seemed 
as though the Goddess were receiving him in no friendly or kindly 
fashion, as she hid her face from him and seemed to banish him 
from her presence.' At the Plynteria, as at other ' unlucky ' 
festivals, the sanctuaries, Pollux^ tells us, were roped round. The 
object was in part to keep out the common herd, perhaps primarily 
to ' avert ' evil influences. 

Photius- discusses the two festivals, the Kallynteria and the 
Plynteria, together, placing the Kallynteria first ; they have indeed 
practically always been bracketed in the minds of commentators 
as substantially identical in content. The Plynteria, it is usually 
stated, was the washing festival. The image of Pallas was taken 
in solemn procession down to the sea, stripped of its gear, veiled 
from the eyes of the vulgar, washed in sea-water, and brought 
back. At the Kallynteria it was re-dressed, re-decked, ' beautified.' 
This simple explanation of the sequence of rites presents only one 
trifling difficulty. Photius expressly tells us that the Kallynteria 
preceded the Plynteria; the Kallynteria took place on the 19th of 
the month Thargelion, and the Plynteria on the second day of the 
third decade, i.e. on the 28th^ It would be strange if the image 
was first ' beautified ' and then washed. The explanation of the 
seeming incongruity is of course a simple one. The word KaWvveiv 
means not only ' to beautify ' but to brush out, to sweep, ' to give 
a shine to.' The Greek for broom is KaWvvrpiov, also Ka\.<X>vv- 
rpov in Hesych. s.v. aapov ; and KaWvap^ara, if we may trust 
Hesychius'*, means sweepings (a-dp/j,aTa). In a word the Kallyn- 
teria is a festival of what the Romans call everruncatio, the 
festival of ' those who do the sweeping.' They swept out the 
sacred places, made them as we say now-a-days ' beautifully clean,' 
and then, having done their sweeping first like good housewives, 
when the house was ready they washed the image and brought it 
back ill new shining splendour. 

It is evident that when we hear of sweeping out sanctuaries 

1 Poll. On. VIII. 141. - Phot. s.v. KaXKuvTy^pia. 

^ Plutarch and PhotiuH cannot both be right, but it is unlikely that Photius 
would ^;ive the xcqueiice incorrectly. 
■* Hesych. s.v. aapfj-ara. 

8—2 



116 Harvest Festivals [cii. 

and washing an image we have come to a religious stage in which 
there is a definite god worshipped, and that god is conceived of as 
anthropomorphic. There may have been rites of the Thargelia, 
including the Pharmakos, i.e. the ceremony of the expulsion of evil, 
before there were any Kallynteria or Plynteria. Be this as it 
may, the Kallynteria and Plynteria throw light on the purport of 
the pharmakos, and emphasize the fact that all the cleansing, 
whether of image, sanctuary or people, was but a preliminary to 
the bringing in of the first-fruits. 

This connection between first-fruits and purification explains 
a feature in the Plynteria that would otherwise remain obscure. 
In the procession that took place at the Plynteria, probably, though 
not quite certainly, the procession in which the image was taken 
down to the sea, Hesychius^ tells us they carried a cake or mass of 
dried figs, which went by the name of Hegeteria. Hesychius is at 
no loss to account for the strange name. Figs were the first culti- 
vated fruit of which man partook ; the cake of figs is called 
Hegeteria because it ' Led the Way ' in the matter of diet ! 

We may perhaps be allowed to suggest a possible alternative. 
Spite of its long vowels, may not the fig-cake be connected with 
the root of a<yo'i rather than with a7&) ? Figs were used in puri- 
fication. Is not the Hegeteria the fig-cake of purification ? A 
necklace of figs was hung about the neck of the pharmakos, and the 
statues of the gods had sometimes a like adornment. Primitive 
man is apt to get a little confused as to cause and effect. He 
performs a rite of purification to protect his first-fruits ; he comes 
to think the offering of those first-fruits is in itself a rite of 
purification. 

As usual when we come to consider the analogous Roman 
festival the meaning of the rites practised is more baldly obvious. 
Plutarch- in his Roman Questions asks, ' Why did not the Romans 
marry in the month of May ? ' and for once he hits upon the right 
answer : ' May it be that in this month they perform the greatest 
of purificatory ceremonies ? ' What these purificatory ceremonies, 
these KaOap/jiOL, were, he tells us explicitly : ' for at the present 
day they throw images from the bridge into the river, but in old 
times they used to throw human beings.' We must here separate 

^ Hesych. s.v. ijyriTrjpia' irapa ijyrjcraaOai odv rfjs rpo^'^s k^kXtjtcli ijyriT'rjpia. 

2 Plut. Q.R. LXXXVI. 



ni] The VestaUa 117 

sharply the fact stated by Pkttarch, the actual ritual that took 
place in his own day, from hi.s conjecture about the past. We 
knoiv images, puppets, were thrown from the bridge, we may con- 
jecture, as Plutarch did, that they were the surrogates of human 
sacrifice, but we must carefully bear in mind that this is pure con- 
jecture. The fact Plutarch certifies in another of his Questions^, 
and adds the name of the puppets. ' What,' he asks, ' is the reason 
that in the month of May they throw images of human beings 
from the wooden bridge into the river, calling them Argeioi ? ' 
Ovid^ tells us a little more : ' Then (i.e. on May loth) the Vestal 
is wont to throw from the oaken bridge the images of men of old 
times, made of rushes.' He adds that it was in obedience to an 
oracle : ' Ye nations, throw two bodies in sacrifice to the Ancient 
One who bears the sickle, bodies to be received by the Tuscan 
streams.' Ovid and Plutarch clearly both held that the Argei 
of rushes were surrogates. It seems possible, on the other hand, 
that the myth of human sacrifice may have arisen from a merely 
dramatic apotropaic rite. The one certain thing is that the Argei^ 
were pharmakoi, were KaddpfxaTa. 

That the time of the Argei, and indeed the whole month till 
the Ides of June, was unlucky is abundantly proved by the conduct 
of the Flaminica. Plutarch'* goes on to say that the Flaminica 
is wont to be gloomy {crKvOpoiird^etv) and not to wash nor to 
adorn herself Ovid"^ adds details of this mourning; he tells us 
that he consulted the Flaminica Dialis as to the marriage of his 
daughter, and learnt that till the Ides of June there was no luck 
for brides and their husbands, ' for thus did the holy bride of the 
Dialis speak to me : " Until tranquil Tiber has borne to the sea in 
his tawny waters the cleansings from Ilian Vesta it is not lawful 
for me to comb my shorn locks with the boxwood, nor to pare my 
nails with iron, nor to touch my husband though he be priest of 
Jove.... Be not in haste. Better will thy daughter marry when 
Vesta of the Fire shines with a cleansed hearth." ' 

The Roman Vestalia fell a little later than the Kallynteria and 

» Plut. Q.n. XXXII. - Ov. Fa><ti v. C21. 

* The whole ceremony of the Argei has been fully di.scussed by Mr Warde- 
Fowler (Tha Roman Fcxtiimh, p. 111). Abundant primitive analoKies have been 
collected by Mannhardt (liaumkultus, pp. 155, 411, -IKi, and Antike Wahl- niid 
Feldkulte, p. 270). For the etymology of Argei see Mr A. B. Cook, Clagx. Rev. xvii. 
1903, p. 209. 

* Plut. Q.R. Lxxxvi. » Ov. Faxti vi. 219—231. 



118 Harvest Festivals [ch. 

Plynteria, but their content is the same. I borrow the account of 
the ritual of the Vestalia from Mr Warde-Fowler^ On June 7 
the penus, or innermost sanctuary of Vesta, which was shut all the 
rest of the year and to which no man but the pontifex maximus 
had at any time right of entry, was thrown open to all matrons. 
During the seven following days they crowded to it barefoot. 
The object of this was perhaps to pray for a blessing on the house- 
hold. On plain and old-fashioned ware offerings of food were 
carried into the temple : the Vestals themselves offered the sacred 
cakes made of the first ears of corn, plucked as we saw in the early- 
days of May ; bakers and millers kept holiday, all mills were 
garlanded and donkeys decorated with wreaths and cakes. On 
June 15 the temple (aedes) was swept and the refuse taken away 
and either thrown into the Tiber or deposited in some particular 
spot. Then the dies nefasti came to an end, and the 15th itself 
hecaxnQ fastus as soon as the last act of cleansing had been duly 
performed. Qiiando stercus delatum fas, ' When the rubbish has 
been carried away.' 

Dr Frazer^ has collected many savage parallels to the rites of 
the Vestalia. The most notable is the busk or festival of first- 
fruits among the Creek Indians of North America, held in July or 
August when the corn is ripe. Before the celebration of the busk 
no Indian would eat or even touch the new corn. In prej^aration 
for its rites they got new clothes and household utensils : old 
clothes, rubbish of all kinds, and the old corn that remained were 
carefully burnt. The village fires were put out and the ashes 
swept away, and in particular the hearth and altar of the temple 
were dug up and cleaned out. The public square was carefully 
swept out ' for fear of polluting the first-fruit offerings.' Before 
the sacramental eating of the new corn a strict fast was observed, 
and (for the precautions taken by the savage ritualist are searching 
and logical) a strong purgative was swallowed. With the new 
corn was solemnly dispensed the freshly-kindled fire, and the priest 
publicly announced that the new divine fire had purged away the 
sins of the past year. Such powerful ' medicine ' was the new 
corn that some of the men rubbed their new corn between their 
hands, then on their faces and breasts. 

1 Warde-Fowler, Rovian Festivals, p. 148. 

- Frazer, Golden Bough, 2nd ed., vol. ii. p. 329. 



m] Purification and Sacrifice 119 

To resume. In the Anthesteria we have seen that sacrifice 
was in intent purification, and that this purification took the form 
of the placation of ghosts. In the Thargelia, purification is again 
the end and aim of sacrifice, but this purification, though it 
involves the taking of a human life, is of the nature of a merely 
magical cleansing to prepare for the incoming first-fruits. 

We pass to the consideration of the autumn festival of sowing, 
the Thesmophoria. 



Note. Since my account of the Thargelia was written Mr W. R. Paton has 
kindly sent me a letter he has published in the Revue Archeologique on The 
Pharmakos and the Story of the Fall. Mr Paton's view is that the object of the 
pharmakos ceremony was to promote the success of cap r {lien t ion. This theory 
throws quite new light on the ceremony and seems to me of the first importance. 
It explains the black and white figs, the male and female victims, and, to the full, 
the ritual beating. Further, it offers a rational and most welcome hypothesis as to 
the ritual origin of the myth of the 'Fall.' 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE WOMEN'S FESTIVALS. 

Thesmophoria, Arrephoria, Skirophoria, Stenia, Haloa. 

' ji QecM0(^6p\ ^'royciN ojcnep kai npo toy-' 

The Thesmoplioria. 

With the autumn festival of the Thesmophoria' we come to a 
class of rites of capital interest. They were practised by women 
only and were of immemorial antiquity. Although, for reasons 
explained at the outset, they are considered after the Anthesteria 
and Thargelia, their character was even more primitive, and, 
owing to the conservative character of women and the mixed 
contempt and superstition with which such rites were regarded by 
men, they were preserved in pristine purity down to late days. 
Unlike the Diasia, Anthesteria, Thargelia, they were left almost 
uncontaminated by Olympian usage, and — a point of supreme 
interest — under the influence of a new religious impulse, they 
issued at last in the most widely influential of all Greek cere- 
monials, the Eleusinian Mysteries. 

To the primitive character and racial origin of these rites 
we have the witness of Herodotus-, though unhappily piety sealed 
his lips as to details. He says, ' Concerning the feast of Demeter 
which the Greeks call Thesmophoria I must preserve an auspi- 
cious silence, excepting in so far as every one may speak of it. 
It was the daughters of Danaus who introduced this rite from 

1 The sources for the Thesmophoria are collected and discussed by Dr J. G. 
Frazer, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Art. Thesmophoria. 

2 II. 171. See also Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. p. 29; Harrison and Verrall, 
Bhjth. and Mon. Anc. Athens, pp. xxxiv. and 102 — 105 and 482; A. Lang, Homeric 
Hymns, Introd. Essay and Hymn to Demeter, and Nilsson, Griechische Feste, p. 313. 



CH. iv] Katliodos and Anodos 121 

Egypt and taught it to the Pelasgian women; but after the upset 
of the whole of Peloponnesos by the Dorians the rite died down 
completely, and it was only those of the Peloponnesians who were 
left, and the Arcadians who did not leave their seats who kept it 
up.' Herodotus oddly enough does not mention the Athenians, 
who were as stable and as untouched as the Arcadians, but his 
notice is invaluable as fixing the pre-Dorian character of the rites. 
Knowing that they were of immemorial antiquity, mo7'e suo he 
attributes them to the Egyptians, and as will later be seen (p. 128) 
there may be some element of probability in his supposition. 

The Thesmophoria, like the Anthesteria, was a three days' 
festival. It was held from the 11th — 13th of Pyanepsion (October 
— November); the first day, the 11th, was called both Kathodos 
and Anodos, Downgoing and Uprising, the second Nesteia, Fasting, 
and the third KaWgeneia, Fair-Born or Fair- Births The mean- 
ing of the name Thesmophoria and the significance of the three 
several days will appear later: at present it is sufficient to note 
that the Thesmophoria collectively was a late autumn festival 
and certainly connected with sowing. Cornutus- says, 'they fast 
in honour of Demeter.,.when they celebrate her feast at the season 
of sowing.' Of a portion of the ritual of the Thesmophoria we 
have an unusually detailed account preserved to us by a scholiast 
on the Hetairae of Lucian ; and as this portion is, for the under- 
standing of the whole festival, of capital importance it must at 
the outset be examined in detail. In the dialogue of Lucian, 
Myrto is reproaching Paniphilos for deserting her; 'the girl,' says 
Myrto, 'you are going to marry is not good-looking; I saw her 
close at hand at the Thesmophoria with her mother.' The notice 
is important as it has been asserted that the Thesmophoria was 
a festival of married women only, which, in Lucian's time, was 
clearly not the case. 

The scholiast* on the passage comments as follows, and ancient 

^ Scliol. ad Aristoph. Thesin. 78. Photius, s.v. and Scbol. ad Aristoph. Thcitm. 
585. 

- Cornut. dc Theol. 28. 

* Lucian, Dial. Mcrctr. ii. 1, firHt published and commented on by E. Kohde, 
Rhein. Mm. xxv. p. 549. Ah the text \n not very ea.sily iicceHHiblc it is ^'iven below: 
Oea/J^ocpopia iopTJ) KWrji'aji' /xi'crTrjpia Trepi^xonffa. rd 5^ avrd kclI (TM/)/)0(/>()pia 
KaXelrai. ijy(TO 0( Kara, tov fj.vOud^o'Tepoi' Xbyov, Uri dvOoXoyovffa rjpTrdt^tTo y Kd/nj 
iiirb TOV \\\ovTO)vo%. rdre kut' iKtivov rbv rbirov ^v(iov\evs tis cnij-iwTTji ive/xev i''s Kal 
cvyKaTtirbOrjaav rtp X'^^'MW' '''^^ Kbpy]-!. els olv Tm.i]v rod VivfiovX^ws plimaOai rovs 
Xoipovs iU TCt xddixaTa t^j A-q/xriTpos kuI ttjs Kdpris. rd oi aairivTa tGiv ^/xfiXyO^i'TUi' 



122 The Thesmophoria [ch. 

commentators have left us few commentaries more instructive : 
'The Thesmophoria, a festival of the Greeks, including mysteries, 
and these are called also Skirrophoria. According to the more 
mythological explanation they are celebrated in that Kore when 
she was gathering flowers was carried off by Plouton. At the time 
a certain Eubouleus, a swineherd, was feeding his swine on the 
spot and they were swallowed down with her in the chasm of Kore. 
Hence in honour of Eubouleus the swine are thrown into the 
chasms of Demeter and Kore. Certain women who have purified 
themselves for three days^ and who bear the name of "Drawers up" 
bring up the rotten portions of the swine that have been cast 
into the megara. And they descend into the inner sanctuaries 
and having brought up (the remains) they place them on the 
altars, and they hold that whoever takes of the remains and mixes 
it with his seed will have a good crop. And they say that in and 
about the chasms are snakes which consume the most part of 
what is thrown in ; hence a rattling din is made when the women 
draw up the remains and when they replace the remains by those 
well-known (eKetva) images, in order that the snakes which they 
hold to be the guardians of the sanctuaries may go away. 

'The same rites are called Arretophoria (carrying of things 
unnamed) and are performed with the same intent concerning the 
growth of crops and of human offspring. In the case of the 
Arretophoria, too, sacred things that may not be named and that 
are made of cereal paste, are carried about, i.e. images of snakes 
and of the forms of men-. They employ also fir-cones on account 

et's TO. fi^yapa KaTava(p^povaLV dvTXrjTpiai KaXoufxevai yvvalKes, Kadapevcraaai Tpiwv 
rjnepwi'. Kai Kara^aifovaiv ei's to. ddvra Kal dveveyKaaat. iiTLTidiaffiv eVi tCjv ^wplQv. 
u)v voixl'^ovaL TOP XafxpavovTa Kai tw cnrbpip avyKara^aWovTa ivtpopiav e^eiv. Xeyovcri di 
Kai dpaKovras Karoo elvai irepi rd xac/^aTa, ovs to. iroWd tCiv fiXrjdfvrwv Kareadieiv 5t6 
Kai KpoTov yevecrdai orav avrXu^iv ai yvvaiKes Kai orav diroTLdOivTai wdXiv rd TrXdafiara 
fKelva, 'iva dvax'^pv<^oj<nv ot dpaKovres oOs vo/xi^ov(TL (ppovpovs tQv ddvTwv. rd Se avrd 
Kai dpp-qT0(f)6pia KaXdrai, Kai dyfrac rbv avrbv Xoyov ^x'^"''''^ Tffp'i- ttjs twv KapwGiv 
yeveaeijji Kai ttjs tCiv dvdpujwwv airopas. dvacpipovraL Se Kdvravda dpprjra iepd eK arearos 
Tov airov KareaKevaa/neva, pufji-qixaTa dpaKdvTwv Kai dfdpQv axVh'-O-T'^''- Xajx^dvovGL de 
Kiivov OaXXovi did to TroXvyovov tou (pvrov. e/i/SdWoi'Tai de Kai ei's rd /xeyapa ovtuis 
KaXovfJ-eva ddvra SKeiud re Kai xo'-po'- ws ^St? ^cpafxev, Kai avToi did rb ttoXvtokov, et's 
avvd-qixa T^s yeviaeics tQiv Kapir(bv Kai ruiv dvdpihwiov, ws x'*P"'"'"'7P"* '''V •^VM-V'P'- eireidTj 
rbv 8r]ix7iTpiov Kapirbv irapixov<Ta iiroirjaiv Tj/xepov to tuu dvffpiinrwi' yevo's. 6 fiev odv 
&V03 TTJs iopTrjs Xbyos 6 imvdiKbs' 6 be rrpoKeifxevos ipvaiKos' Gecr/xo^opta KaXeirai 
Kadbri d(a/j.o<pbpos t) Ar]ij.-r)T7]p Karovo/xdieTai, TiOe'iaa vo/jlov tjtoi 6ecTfj.bu Kad' ovs ttjv 
Tpo<prjV TTopi^eaOai re Kai Karepyd^'eadai dudpuiwovs Seov. 

1 The rites of purification included strict chastity, for the purport of which 
as a conservation of energy see Dr Frazer, Golden Bough, 2nd ed. ii. p. 210. 

- piin7}ixaTa...dvbpG}v axVf^a.Tui', i.e. (pdXXoi. Cf. Septuagint, Is. iii. 17. The 
Arrephoroi are not as I previously (Myth, and Mon. Ancient Athens, p. xxxiv.) 



iv] Kathodos and Anodos 123 

of the fertility of the tree, and into the sanctuaries called megara 
these are cast and also, as we have already said, swine — the 
swine, too, on account of their prolific character — in token of the 
growth of fruits and human beings, as a thank-offering to Demeter, 
inasmuch as she, by providing the grain called by her name, 
civilized the human race. The interpretation then of the festival 
given above is mythological, but the one we give now is physical. 
The name Thesmophoria is given because Demeter bears the title 
Thesmophoros, since she laid down a law or Thesmos in accordance 
with which it was incumbent on men to obtain and provide by 
labour their nurture.' 

The main outline of the ritual, in spite of certain obscurities in 
the scholiast's account, is clear. At some time not specified, but 
during the Thesmophoria, women, carefully purified for the purpose, 
let down pigs into clefts or chasms called /xeyapa or chambers. 
At some other time not precisely specified they descended into 
the megara, brought up the rotten flesh and placed it on certain 
altars, whence it was taken and mixed with seed to serve as 
a fertility charm. As the first day of the festival was called both 
Kathodos and Anodos it seems likely that the women went down 
and came up the same day, but as the flesh of the pigs was rotten 
some time must have elapsed. It is therefore conjectured that 
the flesh was left to rot for a whole year, and that the women 
on the first day took down the new pigs and brought up last 
year's pigs. 

How long the pigs were left to rot does not affect the general 
content of the festival. It is of more importance to note that the 
flesh seems to have been regarded as in some sort the due of the 
powers of the earth as represented by the guardian snakes. The 
flesh was wanted by men as a fertility charm, but the snakes it 
was thought might demand part of it; they were scared away, but 
to compensate for what they did not get, surrogates made of cereal 
paste had to be taken down. These paste surrogates were in the 
form of things specially fertile. It is not quite clear whether 
the pine-cones etc. or only the pigs were let down at the Thesmo- 

fiuf^gested Hcnephoroi, Carriers of Yourif; Things. Suidas, it may bi- noted, has tlie 
formally impossible word app-qvoipopt'iv. It may have arisen from a parononiasia 
and seems to point in the same direction as the ^(ytivj^ara dvopQiv axvf^'^'^^'"' "' ^'l*^ 
scholiast. On the use of the cpdWos among agriculturalists as a jjrophylactic 
against the evil eye and ^v raU rtXtrah . . .axioov airdaais, see Diod. iv. (J. 



124 The Thesmophoria [ch. 

phoria as well as the Arrephoria, but as the scholiast is con- 
tending for the close analogy of both festivals this seems probable. 
It does not indeed much matter what the exact form of the sacra 
was: all were fertility charms. 

The remarks of the scholiast about the double ^,0709, i.e. the 
double rationale of the festival, are specially instructive. By his 
time, and indeed probably long before, educated people had ceased 
to believe that by burying a fertile animal or a fir-cone in the 
earth you could induce the earth to be fertile ; they had advanced 
beyond the primitive logic of 'sympathetic magic' But the 
Thesmophoria was still carried on by conservative womanhood: 

'They kee^) the Thesmophoria as they always used to do.' 

An origin less crude and revolting to common sense is required 
and promptly supplied by mythology^ Kore had been carried 
down into a cleft by Plouton: therefore in her memory the women 
went down and came up. Pigs had been swallowed down at the 
same time: therefore they took pigs with them. Such a mytho- 
logical rationale was respectable if preposterous. The myth of 
the rape of Persephone of course really arose from the ritual, not 
the ritual from the myth. In the back of his mind the scholiast 
knows that the content of the ritual was 'physical,' the object the 
impulsion of nature. But even after he has given the true content 
his mind clouds over with modern associations. The festival, he 
says, is a 'thank-offering' to Demeter. But in the sympathetic 
magic of the Thesmophoria man attempts direct compulsion, he 
admits no mediator between himself and nature, and he thanks 
no god for what no god has done. A thank-otfering is later even 
than a prayer, and prayer as yet is not. To mark the transition 
from rites of compulsion to rites of supplication and consequent 
thanksgiving is to read the whole religious history of primitive man. 

Some details of the rites of the Thesmophoria remain to be 
noted. The Thesmophoria, though, thanks to Aristophanes, we 
know them best at Athens, were widespread throughout Greece. 
The ceremony of the pigs went on at Potniae in Boeotia. The 
passage in which Pausanias- describes it is most unfortunately 

1 The influence of mimetic ritual on the development of mythology will be 
considered later, p. 279. 

2 P. IX. 8. 1. 



iv] The Megara 125 

corrupt; but he adds one certain detail, that the pigs there used 
were new-born, sucking pigs (v? roov veojvwv). Among nations 
more savage than the Greeks a real Kore took the place of the 
Greek sucking pig or rather reinforced it. Among the Khonds, 
as Mr Andrev; Lang^ has pointed out, pigs and a woman are 
sacrificed that the land may be fertilized by their blood; the 
Pawnees of North America, down to the middle of the present 
century, sacrificed a girl obtained by preference from the alien 
tribe of the Sioux, but among the Greeks there is no evidence 
that the pigs were surrogates. 

The megara themselves are of some importance; the name still 
survives in the modern Greek form Megara. Megara appear to 
have been natural clefts or chasms helped out later by art. As 
such they were at first the natural places for rites intended to 
compel the earth; later they became definite sanctuaries of earth 
divinities. In America, according to Mr Lang's accouDt, Gypsies, 
Pawnees, and Shawnees bury the sacrifices they make to the 
Earth Goddess in the earth, in natural crevices or artificial crypts. 
In the sanctuary of Demeter, at Cnidos, Sir Charles Newton- 
found a crypt which had originally been circular and later had 
been compressed by earthquake. Among the contents were bones 
of pigs and other animals, and the marble pigs which now stand 
near the Demeter of Cnidos in the British Museum. It is of 
importance to note that Porphyry'^ in his Cave of the Nymplis, 
says, that for the Olympian gods are set up temples and images 
and altars (^a)/j,ov^), for the chthonic gods and heroes hearths 
(eaxfi pai), for those below the earth (uTroxOovioa) there are 
trenches and megara. Philostratos*, in his Life of Apollonius, says, 
'The chthonic gods welcome trenches and ceremonies done in the 
hollow earth.' 

Eustathius^ says that megara are 'underground dwellings of 
the two goddesses,' i.e. Demeter and Persephone, and he adds 
that 'Aelian says the word is fidjapov not fiiyapov and that it is 
the place in which the mystical sacred objects are placed.' Unless 
this suggestion is adopted the etymology of the word remains 

^ Nineteenth Centuri/, April, 1887. 

^ Newton, C. T., IHncoverien at Halicarnassus, vol. ii. p. 383, and Travels and 
Discoveries in the Levant, ii. j). 180. 
■* Porphyr. de antra Nyiiq)h. vi. 
* VI. 11. 18. "> Eustath. § 1387. 



126 



The Thesmophoina 



[CH. 



obscured The word itself, meaning at first a cave-dwelling, lived 
on in the megaron of kings' palaces and the temples of Olympian 
gods, and the shift of meaning marks the transition from under to 
upper-world rites. 

Art has left us no certain representation of the Thesmophoria; 
but in the charming little vase-painting from a lekythos in 
the National Museum at Athens-, a woman is represented 
sacrificing a pig. He is obviously held over a trench and the 




Fig. 10. 

three planted torches indicate an underworld service. In her 
left hand the woman holds a basket, no doubt containing sacra. 
There seems a reminiscence of the rites of the Thesmophoria, 
though we cannot say that they are actually represented. 

It is practically certain that the ceremonies of the burying 
and resurrection of the pigs took place on the first day of the 
Thesmophoria called variously the Kathodos and the Anodos. It 
is further probable from the name Kalligeneia, Fairborn, that on 
the third day took place the strewing of the rotten flesh on the 
fields. The second, intervening day, also called fiea-r], the middle 
day, was a solemn fast, Nesteia; probably on this day the magical 
sacra lay upon the altars where the women placed them. The 

1 Dr Frazer reminds me that Prof. Eobertson Smith {Religion of the Semites, 
p. 183) derived /x^yapov from the Phoenician maghar, Hebrew meghara 'a cave.' 
The form /xayapov adduced by AeHan, favours this view ; cf. also Photius s.v. 
fjidyapov oii fxi-yapov, els o to. fxvcTTiKa. iepa KaTarWevTaf ovtws 'MivavSpos. 

' Heydemann, Griechische Vasenbilder, Taf. ii. 3. For a somewhat similar 
design cf. Brit. Mus. Cat. e 819. 



I 



IV] 



The Nesteia 



127 



strictness of this fast made it proverbial. On this day prisoners 
were released, the law courts were closed, the Boule could not 
meet^. Atheuaeus mentions the fast when he is discussing 
different kinds of fish. One of the Cynics comes in and says: 
*My friends too are keeping a fast as if this were the middle day 
of the Thesmophoria since we are feasting like cestreis'; the 
cestreus being non-carnivorous. 

The women fasted sitting on the ground, and hence arose the 
aetiological myth that Demeter herself, the desolate mother, 
fasted sitting on the 'Smileless Stone.' Apollodorus-, in recount- 
ing the sorrows of Demeter, says: 'and first she sat down on 
the stone that is called after her "Smileless" by the side of the 
"Well of Fair Dances.'" The 'Well of Fair Dances' has come 
to light at Eleusis, and there, too, was found a curious monu- 
ment^ which shows how the Eleusinians made the goddess in 




Fio. 11. 

' ^farcellinus on HermoR. in Rht't. Graec, ed. Walz, iv. 462. Sopater, ibid. 
viii. i)7. Aristoph. Themn. 80. I)r Frazcr kindly STiRKesta to me that tlu; custom of 
rfileasint.^ prisonciH at thn TheHinoplioriii may be oxitlaincil as a ijrccanlion at^ainst 
the magical intiuence of itnots, fetters, and the like in trammeling spiritual activities 
whether for good or evil, cf. Golden Boiuih, '2nd ed. i. p. :39'2 sqq. 

2 Apollod. I. r,. 1. » Ath. Mitt. 1B«)9, Taf. viii. 1. 



128 The Thesmophoria [ch. 

their own image. In fig. 1 1 we have a votive relief of the usual 
type, a procession of worshippers bearing offerings to a seated 
goddess. But the goddess is not seated goddess- fashion on a 
throne; she is the Earth mother, and she crouches as the fasting 
women crouched on her own earth. 

A passage in which Plutarch speaks of the women fasting is 
of great importance for the understandiug of the general gist 
of the festival. In the discourse on Isis and Osiris^ he is struck 
by the general analogy of certain agricultural ceremonies in Egypt 
and Greece, and makes the following instructive remarks: 'How 
are we to deal with sacrifices of a gloomy, joyless and melancholy 
character, if it be not well either to omit traditional ceremonies, 
or to upset our views about the gods or confuse them by pre- 
posterous conjectures ? And among the Greeks also many 
analogous things take place about the same time of the year as 
that in which the Egyptians perform their sacred ceremonies, 
e.g. at Athens tlie women fast at the Thesmophoria seated on the 
ground, and the Boeotians stir up the megara of Achaia, calling 
that festival grievous {iira-xPrj), inasmuch as Demeter was in grief 
(eV a^et), on account of the descent of her daughter. And that 
month about the rising of the Pleiades is the month of sowing 
which the Egyptians call Athor, and the Athenians Pyanepsion 
(bean month), and the Boeotians Damatrion. And Theopompos 
relates that those who dwell towards the West account and call 
the Winter Kronos, and the Summer Aphrodite, and the Spring 
Persephone, and from Kronos and Aphrodite all things take their 
birth. And the Phrygians think that in the Winter the god is 
asleep, and that in the Summer he is awake, and they celebrate 
to him revels which in winter are Goings-to-sleep and in summer 
Wakings-up. And the Paphlagonians allege that in winter 
the god is hound down and imprisoned, and in spring aroused 
and set free again.' 

Whatever be the meaning of the difficult Achaia- Plutarch 
has hit upon the truth. Common to all the peoples bordering 

1 Plut. de Is. et Os. lxix. 

2 The most satisfactory etymology of the difficult title 'Axata is that suggested 
by Dr Lagercrantz. He connects 'Axata with oxv, nourishment. This would ex- 
plain also the loaves called dxatvat mentioned by Athenaeus (iii. 74, p. 109) on the 
authority of Semos as in use at the Delian Thesmophoria; see Dr Nilsson, 
Griechische Feste, 1906, p. 325. 



iv] Phitarch's Antlwopolooy 129 

on the Aegean and, had he known it, to many another primitive 
race, were ceremonies of which the gist was pantomime, the 
mimicking of nature's processes, in a word the ritual of sympathetic 
magic. The women fasted seated on the ground because the earth 
was desolate ; they rose and revelled, they stirred the megara to 
mimic the impulse of spring. Then when they knew no longer 
why they did these things they made a goddess their prototype. 

Plutarch^ has made for himself in his own image his 'ideal' 
Greek gods, serene, cheerful, beneficent ; but he is a close observer 
of facts, and he sees there are ceremonies — ' sacrifices ' {dvaiai) in 
his late fashion he calls them — Avhich are 'mournful,' 'gloomy,' 
'smileless.' He must either blink the facts of acknowledged 
authorized ritual — this he cannot and will not do, for he is an 
honest man — or he must confuse and confound his conceptions 
of godhead. Caught on the horns of this dilemma he betakes 
himself to comparative anthropology and notes analogies among 
adjacent and more primitive peoples. 

Of two other elements in the Thesmophoria we have brief 
notice from the lexicographers. Hesychius- says of the word 
Sicoy/jba (pursuit), 'a sacrifice at Athens, performed in secret by 
the women at the Thesmophoria. The same was later called 
airoZiay^lxa! From Suidas=* we learn that it was also called 
XaXKiSiKov Stwyfxa, the ' Chalcidian pursuit,' and Suidas of course 
gives a hi.storical explanation. Only one thing is clear, that the 
ceremony must have belonged to the general class of ' pursuit ' 
rituals which have already been discussed in relation to the 
Thargelia. 

"J'he remaining ceremony is known to us only from Hesychius'*. 
He says, ' ^rj/jiia (penalty), a sacrifice offered on account of the 
things done at the Thesmophoria.' 

Of the Thesmophoria as celebrated at Eretria we are told two 
characteristic particulars. Plutarch, in his Greek Questions'', asks, 
' Why in the Thesmophoria do the Eretrian women cook their 

^ Plut. loc. cit. TTtDs o^v xpV<^'''^oi> earl rats ffKvdpwwah Kal dyi'S.AaTOti Kal wevOlnois 
Ovcriais fl /xriTt irapaXnrfiv to. vtvofxtafiiva KttXws ^X^'; tJ-'qTt (pvpav tols rrfpl OeCiv Sii^aj 
Kal (TvvTapdTTHu iiiro^piaii aTdwois ; On the 'sorrowful character of rites of Bowing' 
see Dr Fra/.er, Adauix Attin Osiris, p. 2'ii'A. 

^ Hesych. s.v. diory/xa. ■' Suid. s.v. 

* HeHych. h.v. ^rj/xia- Ovaia tis dwooioofx^i'-n dwkp tQv ya/ofj^vuf iv OeanotpopioLS. 
It is poHsible, I think, that ^Tj/uia may conceal Home form connected with Damia. 

■'' riut. Q.dr. XXXI. 

u. 9 



130 TJie Thes^noplioria [ch. 

meat not by fire but by the sun, and why do they not invoke 
Kalligeueia ? ' The solutions suggested by Plutarch for these 
difficulties are not happy. The use of the sun in place of fire is 
probably a primitive trait ; in Greece to-day it is not difficult to 
cook a piece of meat to a palatable point on a stone by the rays 
of the burning midday sun, and in early days the practice was 
probably common enough : it might easily be retained in an archaic 
ritual. Kalligeueia also presents no serious difficulty, the word 
means ' fair-born ' or ' fair-birth.' It may be conjectured that the 
reference was at first to the good crop produced by the rotten pigs' 
flesh. With the growth of anthropomorphism the ' good crop ' 
would take shape as Kore the ' fair-born,' daughter of earth. Of 
such developments more will be said Avhen we discuss (p. 276) the 
general question of ' the making of a goddess.' A conservative 
people such as the Eretrians seem to have been would be slow to 
adopt any such anthropomorphic development. 

Another particular as regards the Thesmophoria generally is 
preserved for us by Aelian in his History of Animals^ ; speaking of 
the plant Agnos (the Agnus castus), he says, 'In the Thesmo- 
phoria the Attic women used to strew it on their couches and it 
(the Agnos) is accounted hostile to reptiles.' He goes on to say 
that the plant was primarily used to keep off snakes, to the attacks 
of which the women in their temporary booths would be specially 
exposed. Then as it was an actual preventive of one evil it 
became a magical purity charm. Hence its name. 

The pollution of death, like marriage, was sufficient to exclude 
the women of the house from keeping the Thesmophoria. 
Athenaeus^ tells us that Democritus of Abdera, wearied of his 
extreme old age, was minded to put an end to himself by refusing 
all food ; but the women of his house implored him to live on till 
the Thesmophoria was over in order that they might be able to 
keep the festival ; so he obligingly kept himself alive on a pot 
of honey. 

An important and easily intelligible particular is noted by 
Isaeus^ in his oration About the Estate of Pyrrhos, The question 
comes up, ' Was Pyrrhos lawfully married ? ' Isaeus asks, ' If he 
were married, would he not have been obliged, on behalf of his 
lawful wife, to feast the women at the Thesmophoria and to 
1 IX. 26. '^ Athen. ii. 26, p. 46. ^ jg. py„.^ Hered. 80. 



iv] ArrephoHa 131 

perform all the other customary dues in his deme on behalf of his 
wife, his property being what it was ? ' This is one of the passages 
on which the theory has been based that the Thesmophoria was 
a rite performed by married women only. It really points the other 
way; a man when he married by thus obtaining exclusive rights 
over one woman violated the old matriarchal usages and may have 
had to make his peace with the community by paying the 
expenses of the Thesmophoria feast. 

Before passing to the consideration of the etymology and 
precise meaning of the word Thesmophoria, the other women's 
festivals must be briefly noted, i.e. the Arrephoria or Arreto- 
phoria, the Skirophoria or Skira, and the Stenia. 

Arrephoria, Skirophoria, Stenia. 

The scholiast on Lucian, as we have already seen, expressly notes 
that the Arretophoi'ia and Skirophoria were of similar content 
with the Thesmophoria. Clement of Alexandria^ a dispassionate 
witness, confirms this view. ' Do you wish,' he asks, ' that I should 
recount for you the Flower-gatherings of Pherephatta and the 
basket, and the rape by Aidoneus, and the cleft of the earth, and 
the swine of Eubouleus, swallowed down with the goddesses, on 
which account in the Thesmophoria they cast down living swine 
in the inegara ? This piece of mythology the women in their 
festivals celebrate in diverse fashion in the city, dramatizing the 
rape of Pherephatta in diverse fashion in the Thesmophoria, the 
Skirophoria, the Arretophoria.' 

The Arretophoria or Arrephoria was apparently the Thesmo- 
phoria of the unmarried girl. Its particular ritual is fairly well 
known to us from the account of Pausanias. Immediately after 
his examination of the temple of Athene Polias on the Athenian 
Acropolis, Pausanias^ comes to the temple of Pandrosos, 'who 
alone of the sisters was blameless in regard to the trust com- 
mitted to them': he then adds, 'what surprised me very much, 
but is not generally known, I will describe as it takes place. Two 

' Clem. Al. I'rotr. ii. 17, p. 14, 5t' tjv alrlav iv rots {i{<Tixo<poploii fieyapi^oi'Tci* 
{fxeydpois fuii'Toj, Lobeck) x°^P°^^ i fi(ia.\\ov(nv . ravTTjv rrjv fivOoXoyiav al yvyaiKei 
TTOiKiXws /card iroXiv eopT&'^ovaiv (3e<T/xo(p6pLa, '^Kipo(p6pta, 'AppTjT0(f)6pia ttoikLXus Trjf 
<Pept<f>dTTr]i iKTpayuioovaaL dpnayiji'. 

- I. 27. a. 

y— 2 



132 The Tliesmoxilioria [ch. 

maidens dwell not far from the temple of Polias : the Athenians 
call them Arrephoroi, they are lodged for a time with the goddess, 
but when the festival comes round they perform the following 
ceremony by night. They put on their heads the things which 
the priestess of Athena gives them to carry, but what it is she 
gives is known neither to her who gives nor to them who carry. 
Now there is in the city an enclosure not far from the sanctuary of 
Aphrodite, called Aphrodite in the Gardens, and there is a natural 
underground descent through it. Down this way the maidens go. 
Below they leave their burdens, and getting something else which 
is wrapped up, they bring it back. These maidens are then dis- 
charged and others brought to the Acropolis in their steads' 

From other sources some further details, for the most part 
insignificant, are known. The girls were of noble family, they 
were four in number and had to be between the ages of seven and 
eleven, and were chosen by the Archon Basileus. They wore 
white robes and gold ornaments. To two of their number was 
entrusted the task of beginning the weaving of the peplos of 
Athene. Special cakes called avaaraTOi were provided for them, 
but whether to eat or to carry as sacra does not appear. It is 
more important to note that the service of the Arrej^hoioi was 
not confined to Athene and Pandrosos^. There was an Errephoros 
{sic) to Demeter and Proserpine*, and there were Hersephoroi {sic) 
of ' Earth with the title of Themis ' and of ' Eileithyia in Agrae''.' 
Probably any primitive woman goddess could have Arrephoria, 

Much is obscure in the account of Pausanias ; we do not know 
what the precinct was to which the maidens went, nor where it 
was. It is possible that Pausanias confused the later sanctuary 
of Aphrodite (in the gardens) with the earlier sanctuary of the 
goddess close to the entrance of the Acropolis. One thing, how- 
ever, emerges clearly : the main gist of the ceremonial was the 

1 Trans. J. G. Frazei'. Dr Frazer in his commentary on the jjassage, vol. ii. 
p. 344, enumerates the other sources respecting the Arrephoroi ; see also Harrison 
and Verrall, Mi/tliology ami Monuments of Ancient Athens, pp. xxxii. and 512. 

- Dr Frazer draws my attention to the curiously analogous ritual practised at 
Lanuvium, in a grove near the temple of the Argive Hera, described by Aelian 
(Hist. An. XI. 16) and Propertius (iv. 8. 3 sqq.). Once a year sacred maidens 
descended with bandaged eyes into a serpent's cave and offered it a barley cake. 
If the serpent ate of the cake the people rejoiced, taking it to show that the girls 
were pure maidens and that the year's crops would be good : 

Si fuerint castae, redeuut in colla parentum; 
Clamantque agricolae Fertilis annus erit. 

3 C.I.A. III., No. 19. ■» C.I. A. III., Nos. 318, 319. 



n-] 



Arrepliona 



133 



carrying of unknown sacra. In this respect we are justified in 
holding with Clement thafthe Arrephoria (held in Skirophoriou, 
June — July) was a parallel to the Thesmophoria. 

It is possible, I think, to go a step further. A rite frequently 
throws light on the myth made to explain it. Occasionally the rite 
itself is elucidated by the myth to which it gave birth. The 
maidens who carried the sacred cista were too young to know its 
holy contents, but they might be curious, so a scare story was 
invented for their safeguarding, the story of the disobedient 
sisters who opened the chest, and in horror at the great snake they 
found there, threw themselves headlong from the Acropolis. The 
myth is prettily represented on an amphora in the British 




Fig. 12. 



Museum^, reproduced in fig. 12. The sacred chest stands on 
rude piled stones that represent the rock of the Acropolis, the 
child rises up with outstretched hand, Athene looks on in dismay 
and anger, and the bad sisters hurry away. Erich thonios is here 
a human child with two great snakes for guardians, but what the 
sisters really found, what the maidens really carried, was a snake'^ 
and symbols like a snake. Snake and child to the primitive mind 
are not far asunder; the Greek peasant of to-day has his child 
quickly baptized, for till baptized he may at any moment dis- 
appear in the form of a .snake. The natural form for a human 
hero to assume is, as will later be seen, a snake. 

' B. M. Cat. E 418. see Myth, and Mon. Anc. Athens, p. xxxii. 

^ app-qra i(pa....fj.t.fir)fji,aTa opaKbvTiov nal dvopun' crx'?M«'''^''i ^^^ P- ^'^'^i note 2. 



134 The Tliesmoiiliorm [ch. 

The little girl-Arrephoroi in ignorance, as became their age, 
carried the same sacra as the full-grown women in the Thesmo- 
phoria. The perfect seemliness and reverence of the rite is shown 
by the careful precautions taken. When goddesses began to take 
shape the sacra were regarded, not as mere magical charms, but as 
offerings as was meet to Ge, to Themis, to Aphrodite, to Eileithyia, 
but always the carrying was a reverent * mystery.' 

The Skira or Skirophoria^ presents more difficulties. It was 
specially closely associated with the Thesmophoria of which it 
may have formed part. The chorus in the Thesmophoriazusae of 
Aristophanes- says, ' If any of us bear a good citizen to the 
state, a taxiarch or strategos, she ought to be rewarded by some 
honourable office, the presidency ought to be given her at the 
Stenia and the Skira and at any other of the feasts which we 
(women) celebrate.' The scholiast remarks, 'both were feasts of 
w^omen ; the Stenia took place before the two days of the Thesmo- 
phoria on the 7th of Pyanepsion, and the Skira, some say, are the 
sacred rites that took place on this feast (i.e. the Thesmophoria) 
to Demeter and Kore. But others say that sacrifice was made 
eVt 2«ipft) to Athene.' On the other hand in an inscription, 
usually a most trustworthy authority, the two ceremonies are 
noted as separate though apparently analogous. In the inscription 
in question^ which is of the 4th century B.C., certain regulations 
are enforced ' when the feast of the Thesmophoria takes place, 
and at the Plerosia, and at the Kalamaia and the Skira, and if 
there is any other day on which the women congregate by ancestral 
usage.' 

The ancients themselves had raised the question whether the 
Skira were sacred to Athene or to Demeter and Kore. This question 
is not really relevant to our enquiry ; Athene, as will be seen 
later, when the ' making of a goddess ' is discussed, is simply 
rj 'AOrjvaia Kopr], the Koprj, the maiden of Athens, and any festival 
of any Kore — any maiden — would early attach itself to her. 

More important is the question, What does the word aKcpa 
mean ? Two solutions are offered. The scholiast on Aris- 

1 For various views of the SkiropLoria, see Robert, Hermes xx. 394 ; Eohde, 
Kleine Schriften, p. 371; A. Mommseu, Philolog. l. p. 123. 

2 Ar. Thesmoph. 834. 3 c.I.A. ii. p. 422, n. 573 b. 



iv] Skiro2Jlioria 135 

tophanes^ says aKipov means the same as aKidBeiov, umbrella, 
and the feast and the month took that name from the fact that 
at a festival of Demeter and Kore on the 12th of Skirophorion, 
the priest of Erechtheus carried a white umbrella. A white 
umbrella is a slender foundation for a festival, but the element 
of white points in the right direction. The scholiast on the 
Wasps of Aristophanes" commenting on a-Kipov has a happier 
thought : he says a certain sort of white earth, like gypsum, is 
called (TKippa^, and Athene is called '^KLppas inasmuch as she is 
daubed with white, from a similarity in the name. 

The same notion of white earth appears in the notice of the 
Etymologicon Magnum on the month Shii^opltorion, ' the name of a 
month among the Athenians ; it is so called from the fact that in it 
Theseus cari'ied crKlpav by which is meant gypsum. For Theseus, 
coming from the Minotaur, made an Athene of gypsum, and 
carried it, and as he made it in this month it is called Skiro- 
phorion.' 

But, it will be asked, supposing it be granted that Skira 
means things made of gypsum and Skirophoria the carrying 
of such things, what, in the name of common sense, has this to 
do with a festival of women analogous to the Thesmophoria ? 
Dr A. Mommsen^ who first emphasized this etymology, proposes 
that the white earth was used as manure ; this, though possible 
and ingenious, seems scarcely satisfactory. I would suggest 
another connection. The scholiast on Lucian has told us that 
the surrogates deposited in the niegara were shaped out of paste 
made of grain. Is it not possible that the ^Kipa were such 
surrogates made of gypsum alone or part gypsum, part flour-paste ? 
That such a mixture was manufactured for food we learn from 
Pliny*. In discussing the preparation of alica from zea (spelt) he 
says, ' astonishing statement, it is mixed with chalk.' In the case 
of a coarse sort of zea from Africa, the mixture was made in the 
proportion of a quarter of gypsum to three of zea. If this 
suggestion be correct, the Skirophoria is simply a summer 
Thesmophoria. 

If the Skiropiioria must, all said, remain conjectural, the gist 

1 Ar. Ecclen. 18. - Ar. Vcgp. ilLT,. 

•' A. Mommsen, 'Die Attischen Skira-Gebriiuche,' riiilahin. i,. p. Ti."!. 

* Plin. N.II. XVII. 2'>. 2. 



136 The Thesmoplioria [CH. 

of the Stenia is clear and was understood by the ancients them- 
selves. Photius remarks on 8tenia — ' a festival at Athens in which 
the Anodos of Demeter is held to take place. At this festival, 
according to Euboulos, the women abuse each other by night.' 
Hesychius^ explains in like fashion and adds : crTrjvLMaai, ' to 
use bad language,' * to abuse.' According to him they not only 
abused each other but ' made scurrilous jests.' Such abuse, we 
know from Aristophanes", was a regular element of the licence of 
the Thesmophoria. The Gephyrismoi, the jokes at the bridge, 
of the Eleusinian Mysteries, will occur to every one : similar in 
content is the stone-throwing, the Lithobolia of Daraia and 
Auxesia. 

It is interesting to note that in the primitive festivals of the 
Romans, the same scurrility contests appear. At the ancient 
feast of the Nonae Gapratinae, Plutarch^ tells us, ' the women 
are feasted in the fields in booths made of fig-tree branches, and 
the servant-maids run about and play ; afterwards they come to 
blows and throw stones at one another.' The servant-maids 
represent here as elsewhere a primitive subject population ; they 
live during the festival in booths as the women did at the Thesmo- 
phoria, How precisely this fight and this scurrility serve the end 
proposed, the promotion of fertility, is not wholly clear, but the 
throwing of stones, the beating and fighting, all look like the 
expulsion of evil influences. The scurrilous and sometimes to our 
modern thinking unseemly gestures savour of sympathetic magic, 
an intent that comes out clearly in the festival of the Haloa, the 
discussion of which must be reserved to the end. 

We come next to the all-absorbing question, What is the 
derivation, the real root-meaning of the term Thesmophoria and 
the title Thesmophoros ? The orthodox explanation of the Thesmo- 
phoria is that it was the festival of Demeter Thesmophoros, the 
law-carrier or law-giver. With Demeter, it is said, came in 
agriculture, settled life, marriage and the beginnings of civilized 
law. This is the view held by the scholiast on Theocritus^ In 
commenting on various sacred plants, which promoted chastity, 

1 Hesych. s.v. - Ar. Thesm. 533. » Plut. Vit. Rom. sub fin. 

■* Scliol. ad Theocr. Id. iv. 25 ras vo/xluovs ^i^Xovs Kal iepas virep tGiv Kopv<j)Qiv 
avTuv avETideffav Kal wcyavel XiTavfvcrovcrai airyjpxovTO els 'EXeucrti'a. 



iy] Meaning of Thesmoplwria 137 

he adds, ' It was a law among the Athenians that they should 
celebrate the Thesmophoria yearly, and the Thesmophoria is this : 
women who are virgins and have lived a holy life, on the day of 
the feast, place certain customary and holy books on their heads, 
and as though to perform a liturgy they go to Eleusis.' 

The scholiast gives himself away by the mention of Eleusis. 
He confuses the two festivals in instructive fashion, and clearly is 
reconstructing a ritual out of a cultus epithet. Happily we know 
from the other and better informed scholiast^ that the women 
carried at the Thesmophoria not books but pigs. How then came 
the pigs and other sacra to be Thesmoi ? Dr Frazer proposes a 
solution. He suggests that the sacra, including the pigs, were 
called Oea-fjLOL, because they were ' the things laid down.' The 
women were called Thesmophoroi because they carried ' the things 
laid down'; the goddess took her name from her ministrants. 

This interpretation is a great advance on the derivation 
from Thesmophoros, Law-giver. Thesmophoros is scarcely the 
natural form for \a.\\' -giver, which in ordinary Greek appears as 
Thesmothetes. Moreover the form Thesmophoros must be con- 
nected with actual carrying and must also be connected with what 
we know luas carried at the Thesmophoria. But Thesmoi in Greek 
did certainly mean laius, and Demeter Thesmophoros was in common 
parlance supposed to be Law-giver. What we want is a derivation 
that will combine both factors, the notion of law as well as the 
carrying of pigs. 

In the light of Dr Verrall's new explanation of Authesteria 
(p. 48) such a derivation may be found. If the Authesteria be 
the festival of the charming up, the magical revocation of souls, 
may not the Thesmophoria be the festival of the carrying of the 
magical sacra ? To regard the dea/jLol, whether they are pigs or 
laws, as simply ' things laid down,' deriving them from the root 
6e, has always seemed to me somewhat frigid. The root dea is 
more vivid and has the blood of religion, or rather magic, in its 
veius. Although it came, when man entered into orderly and 
civilized relations with his god, to mean ' pray,' in earlier days it 
carried a wider connotation, and meant, I think, to perform any 
kind of magical ceremonies. Is not ^eV/ceXo? alive with magic ? 

' See supra, p. 121 sq. 



138 The Thesmophoria [ch. 



The Curse and the Law. 

But what has law, sober law, to do with magic ? To primitive 
man, it seems, everything. Magic is for cursing or for blessing, 
and in primitive codes it would seem there was no commandment 
without cursing. The curse, the apd, is of the essence of the law. 
The breaker of the law is laid under a ban. ' Honour thy father 
and thy mother ' was the first commandment 'with promise.' Law 
in fact began at a time long before the schism of Church and 
State, or even of Religion and Morality. There was then no such 
thing as ' civil ' law. Nay more, it began in the dim days when 
religion itself had not yet emerged from magic, in the days when, 
without invoking the wrath of a righteous divinity, you could yet 
' put a curse ' upon a man, bind him to do his duty by magic and 
spells. 

Primitive man, who thought he could constrain the earth to be 
fertile by burying in it fertile objects, by 'sympathetic magic,' was 
sure to think he could in like fashion compel his fellow. Curse 
tablets deposited in graves and sanctuaries have come to light in 
thousands ; but before man learnt to write his curse, to spell out 
the formulary Karahat, 'I bind you down,' he had a simpler and 
more certain plan. In a grave in Attica was found a little lead 
figure^ which tells its own tale. It is too ugly for needless 
reproduction, but it takes us into the very heart of ancient 
malignant magic. The head of the figure has been wrenched off, 
both arms are tightly swathed behind the back, and the legs in 
like fashion ; right through the centre of the body has been driven 
a great nail. Dr Wlinsch-, in publishing the figure, compares the 
story recorded of a certain St Theophilos^ ' who had his feet and 
hands bound by magic' The saint sought relief in vain, till he 
was told in a dream to go out fishing, and what the fishermen 
drew up would cure him of his malady. They let down the net 
and drew up a bronze figure, bound hand and foot and with a nail 

^ Sixteen similar figures with feet and bands tightly bound, and in some cases 
the arms pierced by nails, were recently found on the site of the ancient Palestrina, 
see Egypt Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement, p. 332. 

2 R. Wlinsch, 'Eine antike Rachepuppe,' Pliiloloy. lxi. 1902, p. 26. 

^ Migne, Patrol. Gr. lxxxvii. 50 Trept Qeo<j)i\ov rod anb fxaydas crwSedevTos rds 



IV] 



The Curse and the Law 139 



driven through the hand : they drew out the nail and the saint 
immediately recovered. 

The locus classicus on ancient magic and spells is of course the 
second Idyll of Theocritus \ on Simaetha the magician. Part of 
her incantation may be quoted here because a poet's insight has 
divined the strange fierce loveliness that lurks in rites of ignorance 
and fear, rites stark and desperate and non-moral as the passion 
that prompts them. 

Delphis has forsaken her, and in the moonlight by the sea 
Simaetha makes ready her magic gear : 

' Lo ! Now the barley smoulders in the flame. 

Thestylis, wretch ! thy wits are woolgathering ! 
Am I a laughing-stock to thee, a Shame ? 

Scatter the grain, I say, the while we sing, 

"The bones of Delphis I am scattering." 
Bi/'d^, magic Bird, draw the man home to me. 

Delphis sore troubled me. I, in my turn, 
This laurel against Delphis will I burn. 

It crackles loud, and sudden down doth die. 

So may the bones of Delphis liquefy. 
Wheel, magic Wheel, draw the man home to me. 

Next do I burn this wax, God helping me. 

So may the heart of Delphis melted be. 
This brazen wheel I whirl, so, as before 
Restless may he be whirled about my door. 

Bird, magic Bird, draw the man home to me. 

Next will I burn these husks. O Artemis, 
Hast power hell's adamant to shatter down 

And every stubborn thing. Hark ! Thestylis, 
Hecate's hounds are baying up the town. 
The goddess at the crossways. Clash the gong. 

Lo, now the sea is still. The winds are still. 
The ache within my heart is never still.' 

The incantations of Simaetha are of course a private rite to an 
individual end. That the practice of such rites was very frequent 
long before the decadent days of Theocritus is clear from the flict 
that Plato^ in the Laws regards it as just as necessary that his 

1 Theocr. Id. ii. 18 ff. 

- The bird i'u7f, supposed to bo the wry-neck I\jn.r torqniUa, bound on a wlicol 
was a frequent love-chann. It is like the Siren (p. 201) a bnd-soul, an fuchiuiU'd 
maiden with tbe power to lure souls. Such enchanters, half-liunian, half-bird, 
were also the Keledones, cf. Athen. vii. p. 21)0 k a? Kara, rhv avjhv Tpbirov rah la/i^o-i 
Tous dKpown^vovs inolovv 4in.\o.vOavoixivov^ tQv rpoipGiv oid ttjv rjdovrii' a.(pavaivKyOai.. 
In metaphorical lanj^ua^e Hireii and lynx are equivalents, cf. Xen. Mvm. m. II. IH; 
and cf. L»iog. Laert. vi. 2. 70 Toiuvrri tis trpoarjv ivyt, lioy^vovs roii \6yoii. For (tiyi, 
the moon, see Prof. Bury, J. U.S. vii. 1886, p. 157. 

" Plat. Leot/. 983. 



140 The Thesmophoria [ch. 

ideal state should make enactments against the man who tries to 
slay or injure another by magic, as against him who actually does 
definite physical damage. His discussion of the two kinds of evil- 
doing is curious and instructive, both as indicating the prevalence 
of sorcery in his days, and as expressing the rather dubious attitude 
of his own mind towards such practices. ' There are two kinds of 
poisoning in use among men, the nature of which forbids any clear 
distinction between them. There is the kind of which we have 
just now spoken, and which is the injury of one body by another 
in a natural and normal way, but the other kind injures by 
sorceries and incantations and magical bindings as they are called 
{Karahe(Te(7L),ax\di this class induces the aggressors to injure others 
as much as is possible, and persuades the sufferers that they more 
than any other are liable to be damaged by this power of magic. 
Now it is not easy to know the whole truth about such matters, 
nor if one knows it is one likely to be able lightly to persuade 
others. When therefore men secretly suspect each other at the 
sight of, say, waxen images fixed either at their doors or at the 
crossways or at the tombs of their parents, it is no good telling 
them to make light of such things because they know nothing 
certain about them.' Evidently Plato is not quite certain as to 
whether there is something in witchcraft or not : a diviner or a 
prophet, he goes on to admit, may really know something about 
these secret arts. Anyhow, he is clear that they are deleterious 
and should be stamped out if possible, and accordingly, any one 
who injures another either by magical bindings (KaraSeaeaiv) or 
by magical inductions (iTraycoyatii) or by incantations (eVwSaif) or 
by another form of magic is to die. 

The scholiast^ on the Idyll of Theocritus just quoted knows 
that one at least of the magical practices of Simaetha was also 
part of public ritual : 

'The goddess at the crossways. Clash the gong.' 

Hecate is magically induced, yet her coming is feared. The 
clash of the bronze gong is apotropaic. The scholiast says that 

1 Schol. ad Theocr. Id. ii. 10 rbv yap xa^foj' iir^Sov iv rats e/cXeti/'ecrt t^s aeKijvris 
Koi iv Tot's KaToixofJ.ivoL'S* eTreidrj evofii^ero Kadapbs elvai Kal aireXacxTiKbs twv fxiaaiiaTUiv. 
dioirep TTpbs irdcrav d(po(Tl(jiaiv Kai dwoKadapcrtv avrqj ixp^vTo, w ^rjffi Kai ^AwoWddwpos 
ev T(fj TTipl deuiv... .(prjalv ' AtroWbdupos 'AdrjpricrL rbv 'upocpdvT'qv ttjs K6pT]s eTriKaKov/jLivT^s, 
eiriKpoveiv to KaXov/xevou rixeiov. Kai irapd AdK(j3crL (iaaCXeios dirodavbvTO's eiuiGaai Kpoveiv 
\4^T}Ta. The reading KaToixofi-ivoi-s is doubtful ; see Mr A. B. Cook, J.H.S. 1902, 
p. 14. 



iv] The Curse and the Law 141 

'they sound the bronze at eclipses of the moon... because it has 
power to purify and to drive offpoHutions. Hence, as Apollodorus 
states in his treatise Concerning the Gods, bronze was used for all 
purposes of consecration and purgation.' Apollodorus also stated 
that ' at Athens, the Hierophant of her who had the title of Kore 
sounded what was called a gong,' It was also the custom 'to beat 
on a cauldron when the king of the Spartans died.' All the cere- 
monies noted, i"elating to eclipses, to Kore and to the death of the 
Spartan king, are on public occasions, and all are apotropaic, 
directed against ghosts and sprites. Metal in early days, when 
it is a novelty, is apt to be magical. The din (Kp6ro<i) made 
by the women when they took down the sacra, whether it was a 
clapping of hands or of metal, is of the same order. The snakes are 
feared as hostile demons. These apotropaic rites are not practised 
against the Olympians, against Zeus and Apollo, but against sprites 
and ghosts and the divinities of the underworld, against Kore and 
Hecate. These underworld beings were at tirst dreaded and exor- 
cised ; then as a gentler theology prevailed, men thought better 
of their gods, and ceased to exorcise them as demons, and erected 
them into a class of ' spiritual beings who preside over curses.' 
Pollux^ has a brief notice of such divinities. He says ' those who 
resolve curses are called Protectors from evil spirits, Who-send- 
away, Averters, Loosers, Putters-to-flight ; those who impose 
curses are called gods or goddesses of Vengeance, Gods of Appeal, 
Exactors.' The many adjectival titles are but so many descriptive 
names for the ghost that cries for vengeance. 

The 'curse that binds,' the KardBea/io^, throws light on another 
element that went to the making of the ancient notion of sacrifice. 
The formula^ in cursing was sometimes KaraSoJ ' I bind down,' but 
it was also sometimes TrapaUScofxi ' I give over.' The person cursed 
or bound down was in some sense a gift or sacrifice to the gods 
of cursing, the underworld gods : the man stained by blood is 
' consecrate ' (KaOiep(i)/jievo<;) to the Erinyes. In the little sanc- 
tuary of Demeter at Cnidos^ the curse takes even more religious 

' Poll. On. V. 181 vfpi baiixbvi,)v tuiv ivi rCiv dpQi>. ol di Saifioves, ol /xev Xvovrts 
Tcis dpas dXe^iKaKOi X^youruL diroTrofnraloi, dnoTpoiraioi, \vaioL, (pv^ioi, oi 5( Kvpovvres 
dXiTrjpioi, dXLTr]pLudeis, irpoaTpbiraioi., TraXafxvaioi. 

2 W. H. D. House, (Ireck Votive Offeriwfs, p. aa'.*. l^i House says that 
'binding spells' o^/xara 'are still the terror of the Greek bridegroom.' 

■' C. T. Newton, DiHCoverian at Cnidits and ]f<ilic(trnannus. 



142 The Thesniophoria [ch. 

form. He or she dedicates {aviepoT), or offers as a votive offering 
{dvaridi)Ti, for dvarLdrjai), and finally we have the familiar dvdde/jba 
of St Paul. Here the services of cursing, the rites of magic and the 
underworld are halfway to the service of ' tendance,' the service of 
the Olympians, and we begin to understand why, in later writers, 
the pharmakos and other ' purifications ' are spoken of as duaiai. 
It is one of those shifts so unhappily common to the religious 
mind. Man wants to gain his own ends, to gratify his own malign 
passion, but he would like to kill two birds with one stone, and as 
the gods are made in his own image, the feat presents no great 
difficulty. Later as he grows gentler himself, he learns to pray 
only ' good prayers,' bonas preces^. 

The curse {dpd) on its religious side developed into the vow^ 
and the prayer {^v'x^rj), on its social side into the ordinance {deafios:) 
and ultimately into the regular law (vofio^) ; hence the language of 
early legal formularies still maintains as necessary and integral the 
sanction of the curse. The formula is not ' do this ' or ' do not do 
that,' but ' cursed be he who does this, or does not do that.' 

One instance may be selected, the inscription characteristically 
known as ' the Dirae of Teos^' The whole is too long to be tran- 
scribed, a few lines must suffice. 

' Whosoever maketh baneful drugs against the Teans, whether 
against individuals or the whole people : 

' Mai/ he perish, both he aiid his offspring. 

' Whosoever hinders corn from being brought into the land of 
the Teans, either by art or machination, whether by land or sea, 
and whosoever drives out what has been brought in : 
'•May he perish, both he and his offspring.' 

So clause after clause comes the refrain of cursing, like the 

^ Cato, de agr. cult. 134. 3 bonas preces precor uti sies volens propitius mihi 
liberisque, etc. 

- Suidas in explaining e^dpaadai says to €KTf\^<Tai ras dpds, tout' ^an ras ei^xots 
as iiri rals iSpvaecxL tQiv vaQiv eiwOaai. woieiadai. It is wortli notuig that in M.H.D. 
segen is not only as in modern German benedictio but also maledictio, see Osthoff, 
'Allerhand Zauber etymologisch beleuchtet,' Bezzenberger, Beitrage xxiv. p. 180. 

3 Rohl, I.G.A. 497. Tlie whole subject of legal curses has been well discussed 
by Dr Ziebart, ' Der Fluch im Griechischen Recht ' (Hermes xxx. p. 57) to whom 
I owe many references. Also by the same writer in his ' Neue Attische Fluchtafeln' 
{Nachrichten der K. Ges. d. IVitis. zu Gottingen, Phil. -Hist. Kl. 1889, pp. 105 and 
135), and by R. Wiinsch, ' Neue Fluchtafeln ' (Rhein. Mus. 1900, i. p. 02, ii. p. 232). 
Curse Inscriptions are collected in an Appendix to the Corpus Inscriptionum 
Atticarum, under the title Defixionum Tabulae. 



iv] The Curse and the Laio 143 

tolling of a bell, and at last as though they could not have their 
fill, comes the curse on the magistrate who fails to curse : 

' Whosoever of them that hold office doth not make this cursinsr, 
what time he presides over the contest at the Anthesteria and the 
Herakleia and the Dia, let him be bound by an overcurse {iv rfj 
iirapfj e')(6adaL), and whoever either breaks the stelae on which the 
cursing is written, or cuts out the letters or makes them illegible : 

''May he perish, both he and his offsj/ring^ 

It is interesting to find here that the curses were recited at the 
Anthesteria, a festival of ghosts, and the Herakleia, an obvious hero 
festival, and at the Dia — this last surely a festival of imprecation 
like the Diasia. 

On the strength of these Dirae of Teos, recited at public and 
primitive festivals, it might not be rash to conjecture that at the 
Thesmophoria some form of dea/xol or binding spells was recited 
as well as carried. This conjecture becomes almost a certainty 
when we examine an important inscription ^ found near Pergamos 
and dealing with the regulations for mourning in the city of 
Gambreion in Mysia. The mourning laws of the ancients bore 
harder on women than on men, a fact explicable not by the 
general higubriousness of women, nor even by their supposed 
keener sense of convention, but by those early matriarchal con- 
ditions in which relationship naturally counted through the 
mother rather than the father. Women, the law in question 
enacts, are to wear dark garments ; men if they ' did not wish 
to do this ' might relax into white ; the period of mourning is 
longer for women than for men. Next follows the important 
clause : ' the official who superintends the affairs of women, who 
has been chosen by the people at the purifications that take 
place before the Thesmoiihoria, is to invoke blessings on the men 
who abide by the law and the women who obey the law that they 
may happily enjoy the goods they possess, but on the men who do 
not obey and the women who do not abide therein he is to invoke 
the contrary, and such women are to be accounted impious, and it 
is not lawful for them to make any sacrifice to the gods for the 
space of ten years, and the steward is to write np this law on two 

» Dittenborgcr, Hijll. Imcr. 87'J. 



144 The Thesmoplioria [cii. 

stelae and set them up, the one before the doors of the Thesmo- 
phorion, the other before the temple of Artemis Lochia.' 

From the Thesmophoriazusae of Aristophanes we learn almost 
nothing of the ritual of the Thesmophoria, save the fact that the 
feast was celebrated on the Pnyx^ : but the fashion in which the 
woman-herald prays is worth noting ; she begins by a real prayer^ : 

' I bid you pray to Gods and Goddesses 
That in Olympus and in Pytho dwell* 
And Delos, and to all the other gods.' 

But when she comes to what she really cares about, she breaks into 
the old habitual curse formularies : 

' If any plots against the cause of Woman 
Or peace proposes to Euripides 
Or to the Medes, or plots a tyranny, 
Or if a female slave in her master's ear 
Tells tales, or male or female publican 
Scants the full measure of our legal pint — 
Curse Mm that he inay miserably perish, 
He and his house, — but for the rest of you 
Pray that the gods may give you all good things.' 

It is of interest to find that not only were official curses 
written up at the doors of a Thesmophorion, but, at Syracuse, an 
oath of special sanctity ' the great oath ' was taken there. Plutarch^ 
tells us that when Callippus was conspiring against his friend Dion, 
the wife and sister of Dion became suspicious. To allay their 
suspicions, Callippus offered to give any pledge of his sincerity 
they might desire. They demanded that he should take 'the 
great oath ' {ofMoaat rdv fxeyav opKov). ' Now the great oath was 
after this wise. The man who gives this pledge has to go to 
the temenos of the Thesmophoroi, and after the performance of 
certain sacred ceremonies, he puts on him the purple robe of the 
goddess, and taking a burning torch he denies the charge on oath' 
{airofivva-i). It is clear that this ' great oath ' was some form of 
imprecation on the oath-taker, who probably by putting on the 
robe, dedicated himself in case of perjury to the goddess of the 
underworld. That the goddess was Kore we know from the fact 
that Callippus eventually forswore himself in sacrilegious fashion 
by sacrificing his victim on the feast of the Koreia, ' the feast of 
the goddess by whom he had sworn.' The curse is the dedication 

1 Mon. and Mifth. Anc. Athens, p. 104. 

- Ar. Thesm. 331. 3 Plut. Vit. Dion. 56. 



iv] The Hcdoa 145 

or devotion of others ; the oath, like its more concrete form the 
ordeal, is the dedication of the curser himself 

The connection between primitive law and agriculture seems 
to have been very close. The name of the earliest laws recorded — 
they are rather precepts than in our sense laws — the ' Ploughman's 
Curses ' speaks for itself. Some of these Ploughman's Curses are 
recorded. We are told by one of the ' Writers of Proverbs^ ' that 
' the Bouzyges at Athens, who performs the sacred ploughing, 
utters many other curses and also curses those who do not share 
water and fire as a means of subsistence and those who do not 
show the way to those who have lost it.' Other similar precepts, 
no doubt sanctioned by similar curses, have come down to us 
under the name of the Thrice-Plougher Triptolenios", the first 
lawgiver of the Athenians. He bade men ' honour their parents, 
rejoice the gods with the fruits of the earth and not injure 
animals.' Perhaps these were to the Greeks the first command- 
ments ' with promise.' 

Such are the primitive precepts that grow up in a com- 
munity which agriculture has begun to bind together with the 
ties of civilized life. In the days before curses were graven in 
stone and perhaps for long after, it was well that when the 
people were gathered together for sowing or for harvest, these 
salutary curses should be recited. Amid the decay of so much 
that is robust and primitive, it is pleasant to remember that in the 
Commination Service of our own Anglican Church with its string 
of holy curses annually recited 

' They keep the Thesmophoria as they always used to do.' 

The Haloa. 

The consideration of the Haloa has been purposely reserved to 
the end for this reason. The rites of the Thesmophoria, Skirophoria 
and Arrephoria are carried on by women only, and when they come 
to be associated with divinities at all, they are regarded as ' sacred 
to' Demeter and Kore or to analogous women goddesses Ge, 

^ Paroimiogr. i. 388 6 yap jSov^vyris 'Aeriv7]<Tiv 6 t6v lepbv dporov iwiTfXQv dWa re 
TToXXa dparai. Kai roh M Koivuvovffi Karb. rbv j-iiov vdaros t) wvpbs i) fxi] vTrocpalvovcriv 
boov TrXavwjjAvoi^. 

- Toiph. dc Abut. IV. 2'2. 

H. 10 



146 The Thesmophoria [ch. 

Aphrodite, Eileithyia and Athene. Moreover the sacra carried 
are cereal cakes and nephalia : but the rites of the Haloa, though 
indeed mainly conducted by women, and sacred in part to 
Demeter, contain a new element, that of wine, and are therefore in 
mythological days regarded as ' sacred to ' not only Demeter but 
Dionysos. 

On this point an important scholion^ to Lucian is explicit. 
The Haloa is ' a feast at Athens containing mysteries of Demeter 
and Kore and Dionysos on the occasion of the cutting of the vines 
and the tasting of the wine made from them.' Eustathius- states 
the same fact. ' There is celebrated, according to Pausanias, a 
feast of Demeter and Dionysos called the Haloa.' He adds, in 
explaining the name, that at it they were wont to carry first-fruits 
from Athens to Eleusis and to sport upon the threshing-floors, and 
that at the feast there was a procession of Poseidon. At Eleusis, 
Poseidon was not yet specialized into a sea-god only; he was 
Fhytalmios, god of plants, and as such, it will be later seen (p. 427), 
his worship was easily affiliated to that of Dionysos. 

The affiliation of the worship of the corn-goddess to that of 
the wine-god is of the first importance. The coming of Dionysos 
brought a new spiritual impulse to the religion of Greece, an 
impulse the nature of which will later be considered in full, and 
it was to this new impulse that the Eleusinian mysteries owed, 
apart from political considerations which do not concern us, their 
ultimate dominance. Of these mysteries the Haloa is, I think, 
the primitive prototype. 

As to the primitive gist of the Haloa, there is no shadow of 
doubt : the name speaks for itself. Harpocration^ rightly explains 
the festival, ' the Haloa gets its name, according to Philochorus, 
from the fact that people hold sports at the tlireshing-fioors, and 
he says it is celebrated in the month Poseideon.' The sports held 
were of course incidental to the business of threshing, but it was 
these sports that constituted the actual festival. To this day the 

^ Schol. ad Luc. Dial. Meretr. vii. 4 "Eo/jti? ^Adrjvrjcn /xvcrTripia Treptf'xoiicra 
AviJ.r]Tpos Kai Kdp-qs /cat Aiovvaov iirl ttj rofiy tCiv dfiiriXiiov Kal rrj yevcrei tov cltto- 
Keifievov ijdri olvov yivofj-eva irapa W.dTjvaioi.s. 

- Eustath. ad II. ix. 530, 772 'lar^of 8^ 5ti (ttI avyKOfXLdrj KapirOiv i<p^ fi Kai to. 
daXiaia (dvero ioprr] ifyero A^|U7;rpos Kal Aiovvcov Kara llavaaviav, dXya KaXovfxevr] 
5id t6 rals awapxals Kal fj.d\icrTa ev ^Ad'qvais dirb ttjs dXco t^te KaraxpdadaL (pepovras 
(Is 'E\€Vfftva rj fvel KaOa Kal "O/J-ripos €/Ji<pali>€i ev aXojcny HiraL^ov Kara tyjv eoprriv iv ij 
Kal nocreiSwi-os fjv -KOixiTri. 

2 Harp. s.v. 'AX(f5a. 



IV] The HaJoa 147 

great round threshing-floor that is found in most Greek villages is 
the scene of the harvest festival. Near it a booth (ct/ct/i^?;) is to 
this day erected, and in it the performers rest and eat and drink 
in the intervals of their pantomimic dancing. 

The Haloa was celebrated in the month Poseideon ( December — 
January), a fact as surprising as it is ultimately significant. What 
has a threshing festival to do with mid-winter, when all the grain 
should be safely housed in the barns ? Normally, now as in ancient 
days, the threshing follows as soon as may be after the cutting of 
the corn ; it is threshed and afterwards winnowed in the open 
threshing-floor, and mid-winter is no time even in Greece for 
an open-air operation. 

The answer is simple. The shift of date is due to Dionysos. 
The rival festivals of Dionysos were in mid-winter. He possessed 
himself of the festivals of Demeter, took over her threshingf-floor 
and compelled the anomaly of a winter threshing festival. The 
latest time that a real threshing festival could take place is 
Pyanepsion, but by Poseideon it is just possible to have an early 
Pithoigia and to revel with Dionysos. There could be no clearer 
witness to the might of the incoming god. 

As to the nature of the Haloa we learn two important facts 
from Demosthenes. It was a festival in which the priestess, not 
the Hierophant, presented the offerings, a festival under the 
presidency of women ; and these offerings were bloodless, no 
animal victim (lepelov) Avas allowed. Demosthenes' records how 
a Hierophant, Archias by name, 'was cursed because at the Haloa 
he offered on the eschara in the court of Eleusis burnt sacrifice of 
an animal victim brought by the courtezan Sinope.' His condem- 
nation was on a double count, ' it was not lawful on that day to 
sacrifice an animal victim, and the sacrifice was not his business 
but that of the priestess.' The epheboi- offered bulls at Eleusis, 
and, it would appear, engaged in some sort of ' bull fight-',' but this 

' Dem. 59. 116 KarrjpridT) avroO (roD lepo<f>di'Tov) Kal bri '^ivdjiry ry iraipqi ' AXtfioif 
dirl TQS iaxAfia^ ttj^ (v rrj av\rj 'KXtiKXiut irpocrayoiicrrj lepe7ov tlvafuv, ov voixL/xov ovto^ 
ii> TavTQ Tj r]fi^p(/. iepua Ovfiv ovoe eKelvov ovarii Trjs dvalai dXXa rijs iepeias, 

- C.I. A. 11. 1, n. 471 rjpavTo 5^ xal tous ftovs to|i»s] iv 'EXei/crct rfi dvalq. Kal roh 
irpor]poffloii Kal tovs iv Tots aXXots Jepofs /cat yu/ui/acr/ois. Cf. Dittenbcrf^er, Uv Kplieb. 
p. 77. 

■' The nature of tlie contest in not clear. Arteniidorus (i. 8) says : ravpoa iv 
^\(j)vicf. Traioes 'VaKJucmv ayoivi^ovrai Kal iv 'Attik^ irapa. raij ftta'is iv ^ViXtvalvi Kofyioi 
'A^Tjcaioi TTtpiTiWoixivwv iviavTuiv.^ See Lobeck, Aj/I. ji. 2()('i. 

10—2 



148 The Thesmophoria [ch. 

must have been in honour either of Dionysos or of Poseidon who 
preceded him : the vehicle of both these divinities was the bull. 
It was the boast of the archon at the Haloa that Demeter had 
given to men ' gentle foods.' 

Our fullest details of the Haloa, as of the Thesmophoria, come 
to us from the newly discovered scholia on Lucian\ From the 
scholiast's account it is clear that by his day the festival was 
regarded as connected with Dionysos as much as, or possibly more 
than, with Demeter. He definitely states that it was instituted 
in memory of the death of Ikarios after his introduction of the 
vine into Attica. The women he says celebrated it alone, in order 
that they might have perfect freedom of speech. The sacred 
symbols of both sexes were handled, the priestesses secretly 
whispered into the ears of the women present words that might 
not be uttered aloud, and the women themselves uttered all 
manner of what seemed to him unseemly quips and jests. The 
sacra handled are, it is clear, the same as those of the Thesmo- 
phoria : that their use and exhibition were carefully guarded is also 
clear from the exclusion of the other sex. The climax of the 
festival, it appears, was a great banquet. ' Much wine was set 
out and the tables were full of all the foods that are yielded by 
land and sea, save only those that are prohibited in the mysteries, 
I mean the pomegranate and the apple and domestic fowls, and 
eggs and red sea- mullet and black-tail and crayfish and shark. 
The archons prepare the tables and leave the women inside and 

^ Liic. Dial. Meretr. vii. 4 ' Trifiepov ' A\ud ecm, ri oe aol MdwKev eh T-qv ioprriv;^ 
schol. ad loc. 'Eoprrj ' Adrjvrjcri. /j-varripia irepUxovaa A-^^tT/rpos Kal Kdprjs Kai Aiovvcrov 
eirl rrj TOfMrj tQv d/j.TreXwi' /cat rrj yevcreL tov airoKeiijAvov ijdrj otvov yiv6/j.eva. irapd 
'Adyjvaiois iv oh wpoTideTai. (d. Subject fehlt im Cod.: zu crganzen ist vi/j./j.aTd '?) 
TLva atcrxi^''ais di>5peioi.i (sic) eoiKora, irepl iSv dir/yovvrai tL'S Trpbs ffvvdTjfia ttjs tQv 
dvdpiliirwv cnropds yivo/j-evuiv on 6 Aiovvaos oovs tov oluov .... After recounting the ileath 
of Ikarios the scholiast continues, virbp.vrip.a 8e rod rrddovs rj tomutt] eoprrj. iv ravrrj 
Kai TeXeTTj rts eladyeraL yvvatKQv iv ^l£,\ev(jlvL, Kai TratSiai Xeyovrai iroWai Kai ffKuj/ufxaTa, 
fiovai 5e yvva?Kes el<nropevbp.evaL eV dSe/as ix'^^'^'-^ "^ jSovXovTai Xeyeiv. Kai Srj ra 
atax'-O'Ta dWrjXais Xiyovcn Tore, ai Se lipeiaL Xddpa wpocnovaai Tal% yvvai^i KXexpLyafiias 
Trpos t6 ovs ws dw6ppr]T6v ti av/jiPovXeuov(nv. dvacpwvovcn de rrpos aXXr/Xai vdcraL ai 
yvval^Kfs aiVxpa Kai dcrefiva, l^aaTd^^ovaai eidrj awp-droiv (so die Hs, : der Sinn erfordert 
axVM-^'^^" geuitaliuni) dirpeTrrj {dTrpiirel die Hs.) dvdpeld re Kai yvvaiKeia. ivradda olvoi 
re TToXvs irp6K€t.Tai Kai Tpdirei'ai irdvrwv twv ttjs yrjs Kai 6aXdcrar)s yi/xovaai jSpwiadTwv, 
TrXijv TU}V dTretp7]fj.ivojv ev tcjI p.vaTiKu>, poids (priixi Kai jxifKov Kai opviOwv KaTOLKLblwv, Kai 
ojLov, Kai daXacrcrias TplyXrjs epvOlvov (ipidvvov die Hs.), fxeXavovpov, Kwpd^ov ('! Kapdfiov) , 
yaXaiov (yaXeoO?). Traparideacn 5e rds rparre^as oi dpxovres Kai ^v8ov KaraXiTrovTes rah 
yvvaL^iv, aiiToi x'^P^f'"''''" ^f'^ dia/j.evovTf^, eTrideiKvufjievoi Toh e7ridr]p,ov<n Trdcn rds 
7]/j.epous Tpocpds wapd avrCov fvpedrjvai Kai trdaL KOLvwvrjdfjvai. roh dvdpibirois trap' avrQv. 
irpbaKeiTai. 8e rah rpani^ais Kai €k vXaKovvros KareaKevaap-iva dp.<poTipwv yevQv aiboia. 
aXi2a 5i eKXrjdr] 5id tov Kapirbv rod Alovvcov dXooai yap at tQv d/j-iriXuv (pvTeiai.. 



IV] The Ealoa 149 

themselves withdraw and remain outside, making a public state- 
ment to the visitors present that the "gentle foods" were discovered 
by them (i.e. the people of Eleusis) and by them shared with the 
rest of mankind. And there are upon the tables cakes shaped 
like the symbols of sex. And the name Haloa is given to the feast 
on account of the fruit of Dionysos — for the growths of the vine 
are called Aloai.' 

The materials of the women's feast are interesting. The diet 
prescribed is of cereals and of fish and possibly fowl, but clearly 
not of flesh. As such it is characteristic of the old Pelasgian 
population before the coming of the flesh-eating Achaeans. More- 
over — a second point of interest — it is hedged in with all manner 
of primitive taboos. The precise reason of the taboo on pome- 
granates, red mullet and the like, is lost beyond recall, but some 
of the particular taboos are important because they are strictly 
paralleled in the Eleusinian mysteries. That the pomegranate 
was ' taboo ' at the Eleusinian mysteries is clear from the aetio- 
logical myth in the Homeric hymn to Demeter\ Hades consents 
to let Persephone return to the upper air. 

' So spake he, and Persephone the prudent up did ri.se 
Glad in her heart and swift to go. But he in crafty vvise 
Looked round and gave her stealthily a sweet pomegranate seed 
To eat, that not for all her days with Her of sable-weed, 
Demeter, should she tarry.' 

The pomegranate was dead men's food, and once ta.sted drew 
Persephone back to the shades. Demeter admits it; she says- to 
Persephone : 

' If thou hast tasted food below, thou canst not tarry here, 
Below the hollow earth must dwell the third part of the year.' 

Porphyry^ in his treatise on Abstinence from Animal Food, notes 
the reason and the rigo\ir of the Eleusinian taboos. Demeter, he 
says, is a goddess of the lower world and they consecrate the cock 
to her. The word he uses, d(f>Lepa)aav, really means put under a 
taboo. We are apt to associate the cock with daylight and his 
early morning crowing, but the Greeks for some reason regarded 
the bird as chthonic. It is a cock, Socrates remembers, that he 
owes to Asklepios, and Asklepios, it will be seen when we come 

1 Horn. Jlj/m. ad Co: 370. - v. 399. 

•* Poqjhyr. de Abut. iv. ICi. 



150 The Thesmoplioria [ch. 

to the subject of hero-worship, was but a half-deified hero. The 
cock was laid under a taboo, reserved, and then came to be con- 
sidered as a sacrifice. Porphyry goes on ' It is because of this that 
the mystics abstain from barndoor fowls. And at Eleusis public 
proclamation is made that men must abstain from barndoor 
fowls, from fish and from beans, and from the pomegranate and 
from apples, and to touch these defiles as much as to touch a 
woman in child-birth or a dead body.' The Eleusinian Mysteries 
were in their enactments the very counterpart of the Haloa. 

The Eleusinian Mysteries. 

The Eleusinian Mysteries^ are usually treated as if they were 
a thing by themselves, a ceremony so significant, so august, as to 
stand apart from the rest of Greek Ritual. If my view be correct, 
they are primarily but the Eleusinian Haloa : all their ultimate 
splendour and spiritual as well as social prestige are due to two 
things, first the fact that Athens for political purposes made 
them her own, second that at some date we cannot exactly fix, 
they became affiliated to the mysteries of Dionysos. To Athens 
the mysteries owe their external magnificence, to Dionysos and 
Orpheus their deep inward content. The external magnificence, 
being non-religious, does not concern us ; the deep inward content, 
the hope of immortality and the like are matters of cardinal 
import, but must stand over till a later chapter, after the incoming 
of Dionysos has been discussed. For the present what concerns us 
is, setting aside all vague statements and opinions as to the 
meaning and spiritual influence attributed by various authors, 
ancient and modern, to the mysteries, to examine the actual 
ritual facts of which evidence remains. 

Mysteries were by no means confined to the religion of 
Demeter and Kore. There were mysteries of Hermes, of lasion, 
of Ino, of Archemoros, of Agraulos, of Hecate. In general mysteries 

1 The sources for the Eleusinian Mysteries are collected in Lobeck's Aglaophamus. 
Reference to inscriptions discovered since Lobeck's days will be found in Daremberg 
and Saglio's Dictionnaire des Antiquites, s.v. The best general account in English 
is that by Prof. Kamsay in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in French two articles 
reprinted from the Memoires de V Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 
vol. XXXV. 2nd part 1895, and vol. xxxvii. 1900, entitled ' Kecherches sur I'origine et 
la nature des Mysteres d'Eleusis,' and ' Les Grands Mysteres d'Eleusis, Personnel, 
Ceremonies,' and for certain details see H. G. Pringsheim, ArcMologische Beitrdge 
zur Geschichte d. elensinischen Kults, 1905. 



Tv^] The Eleusinian Mysteries 151 

seem to occur more usually in relation to the cult of women 
divinities^ of heroines and earth-goddesses ; from the worship of 
the Olympians in Homer they are markedly absent. In general, 
by a mystery is meant a Hte in ivhich certain sacra are e.rliihited, 
which cannot he safely seen by the ivorshipper till he has under- 
gone certain purifications. 

The date of the mysteries at Eleusis is fortunately certain. 
The ceremonies began on the 13th of Boedromion, i.e. about the 
end of September, an appropriate date for any harvest festival 
which was to include the later fruits and notably the grape. Our 
evidence for this date is an imperial Roman inscription'-, but this 
inscription expressly states that its enactments are ' according to 
ancient usage.' 'The people has decided to order the Kosmeter 
of the Epheboi in accordance with ancient usage to send them 
to Eleusis on the 13th day of Boedromion, in their customary 
dress, for the procession that accompanies the sacra, in order 
that on the 14th they may escort them to the Eleusinion which 
is at the foot of the Acropolis. Also to order the Kosmeter of the 
Epheboi to conduct them on the 19th to Eleusis in the same dress, 
escorting the sacra.' The inscription is of great importance, as 
it is clear evidence that sacra were part of the regular ritual. 
What precisely these sacra were we do not know ; presumably they 
were objects like those in use at the Thesmophoria. The going 
to and fro from Eleusis to Athens is purely political. The sacra 
were really resident at Eleusis, but Athens liked to think she 
brought them there. The Epheboi escorted the sacra, but, as 
was fitting, they were really in charge of, and actually carried 
by, priestesses^. 

On the loth of Boedromion took place the dyvpiJ.6<i or 
assembling of the candidates for initiation, and the proclama- 
tion by the Hierophant in the Stoa Poikile interdicting those 
whose hands were defiled and those whose lips spoke unintelligible 
words\ Some such interdiction, some ' fencing of the tables,' took 

1 Tlie rites at Eleusis were prohuhhj at first confined to women. Dlonysios 
of HalicarnasHos {Ant. Rom. i. 331) says in speaking of tlie cull of Denieter in 
Arcadia, iopvaavro 5i /cat \T]ixriTpos lepbv Kal rds Ovala^ avrji dia yi'vaiKCif sal i>7i<j>a\lovi 
idvcav u)s "EXXT^trt vbfxo'i wv ov8iu o KaO' rj/xS.^ ijWa^e XP'J«'0S. 

2 C.I. A. III. 5. 

•♦ Inscr. A. Mitth. 1H<.)4 p. I(i3 ws a^ to. iepa (f>^pw(Tiu at Upeiai d(T0o/V(rroTa. 
* The exact foriniilury is preserved by Theou of Smyrna, )). 22, t 6 Kx^pvytia. tovto 
KvpvTTfTai 'o(7Tis Tois x«'pa5 fj-v KaOap6i...6(TTis ^wfT/f dffiVfTov.' Some autiionties 



152 The Thesmoplioria [ch. 

place in all probability before all mysteries. It is this prorrhesis 
of course that is parodied by Aristophanes in the Frogs^, who 
actually dares to put his burlesque into the mouth of the 
Hierophant himself. 

The 16th of Boedromion saw the accomplishment of a rite of 
cardinal importance. The day was called in popular parlance 
' aXaSe fivarac,' ' To the sea ye mystics,' from the cry that 
heralded the act of purification. Hesychius"^ in commenting on 
the expression says ' a certain day of the Mysteries at Athens.' 
Polyaenus * is precise as to the date. He says ' Chabrias won the 
sea-fight at Naxos on the 16th of Boedromion. He had felt that 
this was a good day for a battle, because it was one of the days of 
the Great Mysteries. The same thing happened with Themistocles 
against the Persians at Salamis. But Themistocles and his troops 
had the " lacchos " for their call, while Chabrias and his troops had 
" To the sea ye mystics." ' The victory of Chabrias was won, as we 
know from Plutarch'*, at the full moon, and at the full moon the 
Mysteries were celebrated. 

The procession to the sea was called by the somewhat singular 
name eXaais, ' driving' or 'banishing^,' and the word is instructive. 
The procession was not a mere procession, it was a driving out, a 
banishing. This primary sense seems to lurk in the Greek word 
7^oyL47^77^ which in primitive days seems to have mainly meant a 
conducting out, a sending away of evil. The bathing in the sea 
was a purification, a conducting out, a banishing of evil, and each 
man took with him his own pharmakos, a young pig. The eXaat^, 
the driving, may have been literally the driving of the pig, which, 
as the goal was some 6 miles distant, must have been a lengthy 
and troublesome business. Arrived at the sea, each man bathed 
with his pig — the pig of purification was itself purified. When in 
the days of Phocion" the Athenians were compelled to receive a 

think that <(>wvr]v da-vveros means speaking an unknown, barbarous tongue, others 
that it meant having some impediment of speech that prevented the due utterance 
of the sacred formularies. I think the former more probable. 

1 Ar. Ban. 354. 

2 Hesj'Ch. s.v. * Polyaen. Strut, ni. 11. 
•* Plut. de glor. Ath. vii. 

^ C.I. A. IV. 385 d, 1. 20 iwe^iiKridricnxv oe koI rrjs a\ade iXdaeus. 

*> Mr E. A. Neil suggested that the same root and idea may lurk in the 
unexplained pontlfex, i.e. maker of Tro/j.Trai. The connection with bridges is late 
and fanciful. 

7 Plut. Vit. Phoc. XXVIII. 




iv] The EleusinUm Mijderies 153 

Macedonian garrison, terrible portents appeared. When the ribbons 
with which the mystic beds were wound came to be dyed, instead 
of taking a purple colour they came out of a sallow death-like 
hue, which was the more remarkable as when it was the ribbons 
belonging to private persons that were dyed, they came out all 
right. And more portentous still — ' when a mystic was bathing 
his pig in the harbour called Kantbaros, a sea-monster ate off the 
lower part of his body, by which the god made clear beforehand 
that they would be deprived of the lower parts of the city that lay 
near the sea, but keep the upper portion.' 

The pig of purification was a ritual element, so important 
that when Eleusis was permitted 
(B.C. 350 — 327) to issue her au- 
tonomous coinage^ it is the pig / ;%i^ / 
that she chooses as the sign and | )^T,-^^' ^ 
symbol of her mysteries. The \ ( f^| 
bronze coin in fig. 13 shows the 
pig standing on the torch : in the ^^^- ^^^ 

exergue an ivy spray. The pig 

was the cheapest and commonest of sacrificial animals, one that 
each and every citizen could afford. Socrates in the Republic'^ 
says ' if people are to hear shameful and monstrous stories about 
the gods it should be only rarely and to a select few in a mystery, 
and they should have to sacrifice not a (mere) pig but some huge 
and unprocurable victim.' 

Purification, it is clear, was an essential feature of the 
mysteries, and this brings us to the consideration of the meaning 
of the word mystery. The usual derivation of the word is from 
^vw, I close the apertures whether of eyes or mouth. The 
mystes, it is supposed, is the person vowed to secrecy who has 
not seen and will not speak of the things revealed. As such he 
is distinguished from the epoptes who has seen, but equally may 
not speak ; the two words indicate successive grades of initiation. 
It will later be seen (p. 480) that in the Orphic Mysteries the 
word mydes is applied, without any reference to seeing or not 
seeing, to a person who has fulfilled the rite of eating the raw 
fiesh of a bull. It will also be seen that in Crete, whicli is 

1 Head, Ilht. Num. p. S2H: on the reverse is Triptolemos in biw winKcd car. 
- I'lat. Rrp. II. :-J7H A. 



154 The Thesmophoria [ch. 

probably the home of the mysteries, the mysteries were open to 
all, they were not mysterious. The derivation of mystery from 
fjivd), though possible, is not satisfactory. I would suggest another 
and a simple origin. 

The ancients themselves were not quite comfortable about the 
connection with fxvw. They knew and felt that mystery, secrecy, 
was not the main gist of 'a mystery' : the essence of it all primarily 
was purification in order that you might safely eat and handle 
certain sacra. There was no revelation, no secret to be kept, 
only a mysterious tahoo to be prepared for and finally overcome. 
It might be a tahoo on eating first-fruits, it might be a taboo on 
handling magical saci^a. In the Thesmophoria, the women fast 
before they touch the sacra ; in the Eleusinian mysteries you 
sacrifice a pig before you offer and partake of the first-fruits. 
The gist of it all is purification. Clement^ says significantly, ' Not 
unreasonably among the Greeks in their mysteries do ceremonies 
of purification hold the initial place, as with barbarians the bath.' 
Merely as an insulting conjecture Clement^ in his irresponsible 
abusive fashion throws out what I believe to be the real origin 
of the word mystery. ' I think,' he says, ' that these orgies and 
mysteries of yours ought to be derived, the one from the wrath 
(opyrj) of Demeter against Zeus, the other from the pollution 
{fjivao<i) relating to Dionysos.' Of course Clement is formally 
quite incorrect, but he hits on what seems a possible origin of 
the word mystery, that it is the doing of what relates to a fjuvao^;, 
a pollution, it is primarily a ceremony of purification. Lydus^ 
makes the same suggestion, ' Mysteries,' he says, ' are from the 
separating away of a pollution {[xvcro'i) as equivalent to sanctifi- 
cation.' 

The bathing with the pig was not the only rite of puri- 
fication in the mysteries, though it is the one of which we 
have most definite detail. From the aetiology* of the Homeric 

^ Clem. Al. Strom, v. 689 ovk dweiKOTCJi kuI tGiv /j.vcrTTipiuji' rOiv Trap^'EWrjaiv a,pxi(- 
fi^v Kaddpcna Kaddirep Kai iv tois ^ap^dpois to Xovrpdv. 

- Clem. Al. Protr. ii. fxv<TTr}pLa...a.irb rod avfj-^e^r^KOTos ivepl tov Alovvctov ixvcovs. 

^ Lyd. de mens. iv. 38 MuoTTjpta ciTro r^s ffrepTjcreoj? tov fitjaovs dvTi ttjs dyLoavuTjs. 
In form fxvffrijs might come from /jlvoj (cf. d/j-vc^Ti), but Mr Gilbert Murray draws my 
attention to some uses of puiffr-qpLov which point rather to nvaos, e.g. Eur. Suppl. 470 
XvcravTa aefj,vd (TTeixixdTWv fxvaTTipia and El. 87 eK deov p.iKXTrjpiwi'. 

■* The aetiology of the Hymn and the various ceremonies that gave rise to it are 
well explained by Mr F. B. Jevons, Introd. to History of Religion, Appendix to 
Chapter xxiv. 



IV] The Tol-ens 155 

Hymn to Demeter, we may conjecture that there were, at least 
for children, rites of purification by passing through fire, and 
ceremonies of a mock fight or stone -throwing (kido^oXia, 
^aWr]Tv^). All have the same intent and need not here be 
examined in detail. 

On the night of the 19 — 20th' the procession of purified 
mystics, carrying with them the image of lacchos, left Athens 
for Eleusis, and after that we have no evidence of the exact 
order of the various rites of initiation. The exact order is indeed 
of little importance. Instead we have recorded what is of im- 
measurably more importance, the precise formularies in which 
the mystics avowed the rites in which they had taken part, rites 
which we are bound to suppose constituted the primitive ceremony 
of initiation. 

Before these are examined it is necessary to state definitely 
what already has been implied, i.e. the fact that at the mysteries 
there was an offering of first-fruits ; the mysteries Avere in fact 
the Thargelia of Eleusis. An inscription ^ of the 5th century B.C. 
found at Eleusis is our best evidence. ' Let the Hierophant and 
the Torch-bearer command that at the mysteries the Hellenes 
should offer first-fruits of their crops in accordance with ancestral 

usage To those who do these things there shall be many good 

things, both good and abundant crops, whoever of them do not 
injure the Athenians, nor the city of Athens, nor the two god- 
desses.' The order of precedence is amusing and characteristic. 
Here we have indeed a commandment with promise. 

The ' token ' or formulary by which the mystic made confession 
is preserved for us by Clement'* as follows : ' / fasted, I drank the 
kykeon, I took from the chest, {having tasted ?) I put back into the 
basket and from the basket into the chest.' The statement involves, 
in the main, two acts besides the preliminary fast, i.e. the drinking 
of the kykeon and the handling of certain unnamed sacra. 

1 I omit altogether the ceremonies of tlie 17th— IHth, the Kpidattria, as tliey 
were manifestly a later accretion ; the worship of the Epidaurian Asklepios was 
formally inaugurated at Atiiens (see p. 344) in 421 n.c. 

■^ Dittenberger, Hylhxj. limcript. 13. 

•■' Clem. Al. I'lotr. ii. 18 ian to avvd-qixa 'EXevaivlui' 'Ev^ffrev<ra, iinou t6v KUKeCiva, 
i\afiov tK Ki(TTr]s, ipyaffdfj.tvo's CNyyevad/xd'oi) a.TreO^ixrji' e^s KaXadov Kal iK KaXdOov eii 
Klar-qv. Since the above was written, Dr Dictciich {FAiic Mitlini-i-Litiiriiic, p. 125) 
has shown good ra'AHon for supposing that ^pyaadfitvoi is a euphemism for ritCH 
analogous to the iepbs yd/xos: see j). -WS. 



156 The Thesmoplioria [ch. 

It is significant of the whole attitude of Greek religion that 
the confession is not a confession of dogma or even faith, but an 
avowal of ritual acts performed. This is the measure of the gulf 
between ancient and modern. The Greeks in their greater wisdom 
saw that uniformity in ritual was desirable and possible ; they left 
a man practically free in the only sphere where freedom is of real 
importance, i.e. in the matter of thought. So long as you fasted, 
drank the kykeon, handled the sacra, no one asked what were your 
opinions or your sentiments in the performance of those acts ; 
you were left to find in every sacrament the only thing you could 
find — what you brought. Our own creed is mainly a Credo, an 
utterance of dogma, formulated by the few for the many, but it 
has traces of the more ancient conception of Confiteor, the avowal 
of ritual acts performed. Credo in unam sanctam catholicam et 
apostolicam ecclesiam is immediately followed by Confiteor ununi 
baptisnium, though the instinct of dogma surges up again in the 
final words in remissionem jpeccatorum. 

The preliminary fast before the eating of sacred things is 
common to most primitive peoples ; it is the simplest negative 
form of purification : among the more logical savages it is often 
accompanied by the taking of a powerful emetic. The kyheoii 
requires a word of explanation. The first-fruits at Eleusis were 
presented in the form of a pelanos^. The nature of a pelanos has 
already been discussed, and the fact noted that the word pelanos 
was used only of the half-fluid mixture offered to the gods. Its 
equivalent for mortals was called alphita or sometimes kykeon. 
Eustathius in commenting on the drink prepared by Hekamede 
for Nestor, a drink made of barley and cheese and pale honey and 
onion and Pramnian wine, says that the word kykeon meant some- 
thing between meat and drink, but inclining to be like a sort of 
soup that you could sup. Such a drink it was that in the Homeric 
Hymn Metaneira prepared for Demeter, only with no wine, for 
Demeter, as an underworld goddess '.might not drink red wine': 
and such a wineless drink, made in all probability from the pelanos 
and only differing from it in name, was set before the mystae. 

Some ceremony like the drinking of the kykeon is represented 
in the vase-painting- in fig. 14. Two worshippers, a man and a 

1 C.I. A. vol. IV. p. 203, 11. 68 and 72. 

- Annali delV Inst. 1865, Tav. d' agg. F. Naples, Heydemann, Cat. 3358. 



IV] 



The Sacra 



157 



woman, are seated side by side ; before them a table piled with 
food, beneath it a basket of loaves. They are inscribed Mysta 
(Mucrra). A priest holding in the left hand twigs and standing 
by a little shrine, offers to them a cylix containing some form of 
drink. The presence of the little shrine has made some commen- 
tators see in the priest an itinerant quack priest (dyvpTT)<i), but it 




Fig. 14. 



is quite possible that shrines of this kind containing sacra were 
carried at the Eleusinian mysteries. Anj^how the scene depicted 
is analogous. 

Of the actual sacra which the initiated had to take from the 
chest, place in the basket, and replace in the chest, we know 
nothing. The sacra of the Thosmophoria are known, those of the 
Dionysiac mysteries were of trivial character, a ball, a mirror, a 
cone, and the like : there is no reason to suppose that the sacra of 
the Eleusinian mysteries were of any greater intrinsic signiiicance. 



158 The Thesino2)lioria [ch. 

Clement^ in a passage preceding that already quoted gives the 
Eleusinian ' tokens,' with slightly different wording and with two 
additional clauses : he says ' the symbols of this initiation are, 
I ate from the timbrel, I drank from the cymbal, I carried the 
kernos, I passed beneath the pastos.' The scholiast- on Plato's 
Gorgias makes a similar statement. He says ' at the lesser 
mysteries many disgraceful things were done, and these words 
were said by those who were being initiated : I ate from the 
timbrel, I drank from the cymbal, I carried the kernos'; he further 
adds by way of explanation ' the kernos is the liknon or ptuon,' 
i.e. it is some form of winnowing fan. 

There has been much and, I think, needless controversy as to 
whether this form of the tokens belongs to the mysteries at Eleusis 
or not. From the words that precede Clement's statement, a 
mention of Attis, Kybele and the Korybants, it is quite clear that 
he has in his mind the mysteries of the Great Mother of Asia 
Minor, but from his mentioning Demeter also, it is also clear that 
he does not exactly distinguish between the two. The mention 
of the ' tokens ' by the scholiast on Plato is expressly made with 
reference to the Lesser Mysteries, and these, it will later (Chap, x.) 
be seen, are related especially to Kore and Dionysos. The whole 
confusion rests on the simple mythological fact that Demeter 
and Cybele were but local forms of the Great Mother worshipped 
under diverse names all over Greece, Wherever she was wor- 
shipped she had mysteries, the timbrel and the cymbal came to be 
characteristic of the wilder Asiatic Mother, but the Mother at 
Eleusis also clashed the brazen cymbals. In her ' tokens ' however 
her mystics ate from the cista and the basket, but the distinction 
is a slight one. 

The question of the kernos is of some interest. The scholiast 
states that the kernos was a winnowing fan, and the winnowing 
fan we shall later see (p. 548) was, at least in Alexandrine days, 

^ Clem. Al. Protr. i. 2. 13 ArjoOs /xvffTrjpia kuI (leg. al) Aids wpbs fi-qrepa A-^fjirjTpa 
acppodicTiai av/jLTrXoKal Kal fxr)vis rrjs AtjoOs /cat Atos iKeTrjpiai. ravra Te\l<jKoi'(Ttv oi 
^pvyes" A-TTidi Kai Kv^iXri Kal Kopv^aai, — to, ffv/JL^oXa ttjs fivrjaeus ravrris 'E\' ti'/j.ttoli'ov 
^(payov, eK Kvfi^dXov 'iiriov, iKipvo(p6priaa, inro tov iracTTov viribvov. 

- Schol. ad Plat. Gorg. p. 128 ev oh (rois aixLKpoh /j.vcrTT]piot.s) noWa iJ.kv iirpdrTero 
alcrxpd., eXeyero 8i irpos tQv fivovfiivuiv Tavra- e/c TVfMwdvov i<payov, iK KV/j.j3d\ov Uttiov, 
iKepvo(pbpr]<ja (K^pvos Se rb \iKvov fiyovv to tttvov iariv), virb rbv iraarbv v-rredvov Kal 
rd €^7js. The concluding formulary, -which does not occur in the Eleusinian 
confession, will be explained later (Chap. x. ). 



iv] The Kerno2)horia 159 

used in the mysteries of Eleusis. It was a simple agricultural 
instrument taken over and mysticized by the religion of Dionysos. 
From Athenaeus^ however we learn of another kind of kernos. 
In his discussion of the various kinds of cups and their uses he 
says : ' Kernos, a vessel made of earthenware, having in it many 
little cups fastened to it, in which are white poppies, wheat, barley, 
pulse, vetch, ochroi, lentils ; and he who carries it after the fashion 
of the carrier of the liknon, tastes of these things, as Ammonius 
relates in his third book On Altars and Sacrifices.' A second and 
rather fuller notice of the kernos is given by Athenaeus- a little 
later in discussing the kotylos. ' Polemon in his treatise " On the 
Dian Fleece " says, " And after this he performs the rite and takes 
it from the chamber and distributes it to those who have borne 
the kernos aloft." ' Then follows an amplified list of the contents 
of the kernos. The additions are italicized : ' sage, white poppies, 
wheat, barley, pulse, vetch, ochroi, lentils, beans, spelt, oats, a cake, 
honey, oil, tuine, milk, sheep's luool anwasJted.' 

The list of the irayKapTrta, the offering of all fruits and natural 
products, is in some respects a primitive one : the unwashed wool 
reminds us of the simple offering made by Pausanias at the cave 
of Demeter at Phigalia ; but there are late additions, the manu- 
factured olive oil and wine. Demeter in early days would assuredly 
never have accepted wine. Vessels exactly corresponding to the 
description given by Athenaeus have been found in considerable 
numbers in Melos and Crete and, of later date, in the precinct 
at Eleusis, both vessels meant for use and others obviously votive. 
In the accounts* of the officials at Eleusis for the year 408 — 7 B.C. 
there is mention of a vessel called «:e/3%ro9, which in all probability 
is identical with the ker)ios of Athenaeus. The shape and purport 
of the vessel are clearly seen in the early specimen from Melos ^ in 

1 Athen. xi. .52, p. 476. 

"^ Athen. xi. .56, p. 478 6'crot avw to Kipvo': Trepievrji'oxirfi. tovto 5' i<TTlv ayyelov 
KepafJ-fovv ^X"" *" ai'^'y iroWovs KOTi'\iaKOvs KeKoWri/x^voi'^' ivtici 5' avToh bpfuvoi, 
fjLTjKOjvei XiVKoi, wvpoi, KpiOai, iriaoi, \d.Ovpoi, uxpoi, (paKol, Kva/xot, i'lial, jipdfxos, Tra\d$iov, 
/xAt, ?\aiov, oivos, ydXa, diov ipiov S.w\vtov. 6 5e tovto ^aaTaaas olov \iKvo<t>opi)(Ta% 
TovTuv yeviTai. I have tranKlated the dillicult Avw by aloft taking it as lofening to 
tlie carrying on the head, but nee ' Kerchnos,' O. Hubeiisohn, A. Mitt. 18'.)H, xxiii. 
p. 270, to wliorn I am irxlebted for many references. The Kenwjihoria is well 
shown in the Ninnioii pinax on p. ;5.51). 

•■' 'Vj(}iy)p.ipi.% 'Apx- IHliH, p. (»1 xp^^o^ K^pX""' I'- 

•• British Museum, Annual of lirilish School at Atliciix, vol. iii. p. .57, I'l. iv. As 
7'rofessor Bosanquet pointed oiit to me it is likely that the Kernos at Eleusis was 
borrowed from the Cietan mysteries. 



160 



The Thesmophoria 



[CH. 



fig. 15. Such a vessel might well be called a separator; each of 
the little kotyliskoi attached would contain a sample of the various 




Fig. 15. 

grains and products. It is easy to see how the scholiast might 
explain it as a lihnon. The liknon was an implement for winnow- 
ing, separating grain from chaff, the kernos a vessel in which 
various sorts of grain could be kept separate. The Kernoplioria 
was nothing but a late and elaborate form of the offering of first- 
fruits. In the simple primaeval form of the Mysteries as certified 
by the tokens, we have but two elements, the presentation and 
tasting of first-fruits and the handling of sacra. All later accre- 
tions will be discussed in the chapter on Orphic Mysteries. 

In discussing the Anthesteria (p. 42) mention has already been 
made of a rite which, according to Athenaeus^ took place on the 
final day of the Mysteries. On this day, which took its name from 
the rite, two vessels called plemochoae were emptied, one towards 
the east, the other towards the west, and at the moment of out- 
pouring a mystic formulary was pronounced. Athenaeus explains 
that a plemocho^ was an earthenware vessel ' shaped like a top but 
standing secure on its basis ' : it seems to have been a vessel in 

1 Athen. xr. 93, p. 496. 



iv] Purijication and Sacrifice 101 

general use for the service of the underworld, for he quotes a play 
called Peirithous in which one of the characters said : 

' That these plemochoai with well- omened words 
We may pour down into the chthonian chasm.' 

What the mystic formulary was we cannot certainly say, but 
it is tempting to connect the libation of the plemochoe with a 
formulary recorded by Proclos^ He says 'In the Eleusinian 
Mysteries, looking up to the sky they cried aloud " Rain," and 
looking down to earth they cried "Be fruitful.'" The simplicity 
of the solemn little prayer cannot be reproduced in English. It 
was a fitting close to rites so primitive. 

Last of all, over those who had been initiated were uttered, if 
we may trust Hesychius-, the mysterious words Ko7^ ofnra^. 

It remains to resume the results of the last four chapters. 
It has been seen in examining four of the great public festivals 
of Athens, the Diasia, the Anthesteria, the Thargelia, the Thesmo- 
phoria, that neither their names, nor primarily their ritual, were 
concerned with the worship of the Olympian gods to whom the 
festivals were ostensibly dedicated. When the nature of that 
ritual was examined, it was seen to consist not in sacrifice like 
that paid to the Olympians, which was of the nature of tendance 
and might be embodied in the formula do ut des, but rather of 
ceremonies of aversion based on ignorance and fear. Its formula 
was do ut abeas. In the Anthesteria the ceremonies known as 
ivayia-fjioi, were seen to be purifications (Kadap/xol), and by purifi- 
cations were meant placations of Keres, of ghosts and sprites. 
In the Thargelia the ceremony of the pharmakos was seen to 
be also a purification, but in the sense not of the placation or 
riddance of ghosts and sprites but of a magical cleansing from 
physical evil. In the Thesmophoria the ceremony with the pigs 
was preceded by ceremonies of purification, and was in itself of 
magical intent. Moreover the element of cursing and devotion 
was seen to lie at the root of the later notion of consecration. 
To these three festivals, taken from the three seasons of the 

' Procl. ad Plat. Tim. p. 29:} iv roh 'EXewii'iots ih ixkv top ovpavov ava^Xiirovrti 
(^duv ' i/e,' KaTa^\i\pai>Tts oi di T'r}i> yriv ' Kve.^ 

^ Hesych. b.v. K67I ofx-rrai^- iirupd>fntxa TfTeXefffxivois. Mr ¥. M. Coniford HUgK«'>^tH 
that the ori(^inal form may have becu K6y^ov ird^, 'Sound the couch— fiioiiKh.' 
See alHO Lobeck, Af/lao^ili. 775. 

H. n 



162 The Tliesmoplwria [ch. iv 

agricultural year, has now been added the rite of the Eleusinian 
Mysteries, the gist of which has been shown to be purification as 
preliminary to the handling of magical sacrxi and to the partaking 
of first-fruits. 

The only just way of understanding the religious notions of a 
particular race is to examine the terminology of the language of 
that race. Our modern notion of ancient religion is largely summed 
up by the word ' sacrifice.' We are too apt to ask ' what was the 
nature of sacrifice among the Greeks?' If we follow the lead of 
their language instead of imposing our language on them, it is 
abundantly clear that sacrifice, with all our modern connotations 
of vicarious expiation and of mystical communion, they had not. 
All the ancient ceremonies, so far considered, point to a thought 
simpler and nowise less beautiful or less deeply religious, and 
that thought is purification. Purification practically unknown to 
Olympian worship is the keynote of the lower stratum. 

It is all important that this should be clearly and emphatically 
stated at this point in order that the sequel may be intelligible. 
When the new impulse connected with the names of Dionysos 
and Orpheus entered Greece, it left aside the great and popular 
Olympian system embodied in the formula do ut des, and, by a 
true instinct, fastened on an element which, if in some respects 
it was lower, was truer to fact and had in it higher possibilities, 
a religion that recognised evil, though mainly in physical form, 
and that sought for purification. 

The essence of that new religion was, as will later be shown, 
the belief that man could become god : the new ritual feature it 
introduced, a feature wholly lacking in the old uneaten ' sacrifices,' 
was mystical communion by the eating of the body of the god. 
But, because man was mortal, there was mortality to be purged 
awa}^ ; and hence, although with a new faith and hope, men 
reverted to the old ritual of purification. 

So much by anticipation ; but before we come to the study of 
the new impulse it is necessary to leave ritual and turn to theology, 
which is in fact mythology : the rites have been considered, and now 
in the next three chapters something must be said of the beings 
worshipped, — at first in vague shifting outlines as ghosts and 
sprites, — later crystallized into clear shapes as goddesses and gods. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE DEMOXOLOGY OF GHOSTS AND SPRITES AND BOGEYS. 

' d) MefAAAYXoi ka"i ({)66pcir6Neic 
Kfipec 'EpiNYec' 

In the preceding chapters the nature of Greek ritual has been 
discussed. The main conclusion that has emerged is that this 
ritual in its earlier phases was mainly characterized by a tendency 
to what the Greeks called airoTpoirri, i.e. the turning away, the 
aversion of evil. This tendency was however rarely quite un- 
touched by an impulse more akin to our modern notion of worship, 
the impulse to depaTrela, i.e. the induction, the fostering of good 
influences. 

Incidentally we have of course gathered something of the 
nature of the objects of worship. When the ritual was not an 
attempt at the direct impulsion of nature, we have had brief 
uncertain glimpses of sprites and ghosts and underworld divinities. 
It now remains to trace with more precision these vague theo- 
logical or demonological or mythological outlines, to determine the 
character of the beings worshipped and something of the order of 
their development. 

In theology facts are harder to seek, truth more difficult to 
formulate than in ritual. Ritual, i.e. what men did, is either 
known or not known ; what they meant by what they did — the 
connecting link between ritual and theology — can sometimes be 
certainly known, more often precariously inferred. Still more 
hazardous is the attempt to determine how man thought of the 
objects or beings to whom his ritual was addressed, in a word what 
was his theology, or, if we prefer the term, his mythology. 

At the outset one preliminary caution is imperative. Our 

11—2 



164 Demonologij of Gliosis, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

minds are imbued with current classical mythology, our imagination 
peopled with the vivid personalities, the clear-cut outlines of the 
Olympian gods; it is only by a somewhat severe mental effort that 
we realize the fact essential to our study that there were no gods 
at all, that what we have to investigate is not so many actual facts 
and existences but only conceptions of the human mind, shifting 
and changing colour with every human mind that conceived them. 
Art which makes the image, literature which crystallizes attributes 
and functions, arrest and fix this shifting kaleidoscope ; but, until 
the coming of art and literature and to some extent after, the 
formulary of theology is ' all things are in flux ' {iravra pel). 

Further, not only are we dealing solely with conceptions of the 
human mind, but often with conceptions of a mind that conceived 
things in a fashion alien to our own. There is no greater bar to 
that realizing of mythology^ which is the first condition of its 
being understood, than our modern habit of clear analytic thought. 
The very terms we use are sharpened to an over nice discrimina- 
tion. The first necessity is that by an effort of the sympathetic 
imagination we should think back the ' many ' we have so sharply 
and strenuously divided, into the haze of the primitive ' one.' 

Nor must we regard this haze of the early morning as a dele- 
terious mental fog, as a sign of disorder, weakness, oscillation. It 
is not confusion or even synthesis ; rather it is as it were a proto- 
plasmic fulness and forcefulness not yet articulate into the diverse 
forms of its ultimate births. It may even happen, as in the case of 
the Olympian divinities, that articulation and discrimination sound 
the note of approaching decadence. As Maeterlinck'"' beautifully 
puts it, la clarte parfaite nest-elle pas d'ordinaire le signe de la 
lassitude des idees ? 

There is a practical reason why it is necessary to bear in mind 
this primary fusion, though not confusion, of ideas. Theology, 
after articulating the one into the many and diverse, after a course 
of exclusive and determined discrimination, after differentiating 
a number of departmental gods and spirits, usually monotheizes, 
i.e. resumes the many into the one. Hence, as will be constantly 
seen, mutatis mutandis, a late philosophizing author is often of 

^ My position in this matter was stated long ago in an article in the Journal of 
Hellenic Studies, xx. 1899, pp. 211, 244. 
2 Sagesse et Destin^e, p. 76. 



v] The Ker as Evil Sprite 1(35 

great use iu illustrating a primitive conception : the multiform 
divinity of an Orphic Hymn is nearer to the primitive mind than 
the clear-cut outlines of Homer's Olympians. 



In our preliminar}' examination of Athenian festivals we found 
underlying the Diasia the worship of a snake, underlying the 
Authesteria the revocation of souls. In the case of the Thesmo- 
phoria we found magical ceremonies for the promotion of fertility 
addressed as it would seem directly to the earth itself: in the 
Thargelia we had ceremonies of purification not primarily addressed 
to any one. In the Diasia and Anthesteria only was there clear 
evidence of some sort of definite being or beings as the object of 
worship. The meaning of snake-worship will come up for dis- 
cussion later (p. 325), for the present we must confine ourselves 
to the theology or deraonology of the beings worshipped in 
the Anthesteria, the Keres, sprites, or ghosts, and the theological 
shapes into which they are developed and discriminated. 

The Ker as Ghost and Sprite. 

That the Keres dealt with in the Anthesteria — ' worshipped ' 
is of course too modern a word — were primarily ghosts, admits, 
in the face of the evidence previously adduced (pp. 48, 44), of no 
doubt. That in the fifth century B.C. they were thought of as 
little winged sprites the vase-painting in fig. 7 clearly shows, and 
to it might be added the evidence of countless other Athenian 
white lekythi where the eidolon or ghost is shown Muttering about 
the grave. But to the ancients Keres was a word of far larger and 
vaguer connotation than our modern gliosis, and we must grasp this 
wider connotation if we would understand the later developments 
of the term. 

Something of their natiu^e has already appeared in the apotro- 
paic precautions of the Anthesteria. Pitch was smeared on the 
doors to catch them, cathartic buckthorn was chewed to eject them ; 
they were dreaded as sources of evil ; they were, if not exactly evil 
spirits, certainly spirits that brought evil : else why these pre- 
cautions ? Plato has this in his mind when he says' 'There are 

' Le(j(j. XI. p. 9H7 d toU w\el<rTois avrCiv olov K^^es iirLirt<t>vKa<nv, al KaTafitalvoval 
T€ Kal KaTappinralvovcni' avrd. 



166 Demonology of Ghosts, Sjrrites, Bogeys [ch. 



many fair things in the life of mortals, but in most of them there 
are as it were adherent Keres which pollute and disfigure them.' 
Here we have not merely a philosophical notion, that there is 
a soul of evil in things good, but the reminiscence surely of 
an actual popular faith, i.e. the belief that Keres, like a sort 
of personified bacilli, engendered corruption and pollution^ To 
such influences all things mortal are exposed. Conon- in telling 
the story of the miraculous head of Orpheus (p. 467) says that 
when it was found by the fisherman ' it was still singing, nor 
had it suffered any change from the sea nor any other of the 
outrages that humaa Keres inflict on the dead, but it was still 
blooming and bleeding with fresh blood.' Conon is of course a 
late writer, and full of borrowed poetical phrases, but the expres- 
sion human Keres (dvOpcoTrivai Krjpe'^) is not equivalent to the 
Destiny of man, it means rather sources of corruption inherent 
in man. 

In fig. 7 we have seen a representation of the harmless 
Keres, the souls fluttering out of the grave-pithos. Fortunately 
ancient art has also left us 
a representation of a bale- 
ful Ker. The picture in 
fig. 16 is from a pelike^ 
found at Thisbe and now 
in the Berlin Museum ^ 
Herakles, known by his 
lion skin and quiver, swings 
bis rudely hewn club {kXo.- 
So?) against a tiny winged 
figure with shrivelled body 
and distorted ugly face. 
We might have been at 
a loss to give a name to 
his feeble though repulsive 

1 I am indebted for this and many important references to the article on Keres 
by Dr Otto Crusius in Eoscher's Lexicon (Bd. ii. 1148). Dr Crusius' admirable 
exposition of the nature of the Keres suffers only from one defect, that he feels 
himself obliged to begin it with the comparatively late literary conceptions ^^of 
Homer. 

2 Conon, Narr. xlv. 

^ Pubhshed and explained as Herakles Kr]pa/xvvTr]s by Professor Furtwangler, 
Jahrb. d. Inst. 1895, p. 37. 
•» Berlin, I?iv. 3317. 




v] The Ker as BaeiUus 107 

antagonist but for' an Orphic Hymn to Herakles^ which ends with 
the prayer : 

'Come, blessed hero, come and bring allayments 
Of all diseases. Brandishing thy club, 
Drive forth the baleful fates ; with poisoned shafts 
Banish the noisome Keres far away.' 

The primitive Greek leapt by his reh'gious imagination to 
a forecast of the truth that it has taken science centuries to 
estabhsh, i.e. the fact that disease is caused by little live things, 
germs — bacilli we call them, he used the word Keres. A fragment 
of the early comic poet Sophron" speaks of Herakles throttling 
Hepiales. Hepiales must be the demon of nightmare, well known 
to us from other sources and under various confused names as 
Ephialtes, Epiales, Hepialos. The Etymologicon Magnum^ explains 
' Hepialos ' as a shivering fever and ' a daimon that comes upon 
those that are asleep.' It has been proposed to regard the little 
winged figure which Herakles is clearly taking by the throat 
as Hepiales^, demon of nightmare, rather than as a Ker. The 
question can scarcely be decided, but the doubt is as instructive 
as any certainty. Hepiales is a disease caused by a Ker ; i.e. it is 
a special form of Ker, the nightmare bacillus. Blindness also was 
caused by a Ker, as was madness ; hence the expression ' casting 
a black Ker on their eyes'.' Blindness and madness, blindness 
of body and spirit^ are scarcely distinguished, as in the blindness 
of Oedipus ; both come of the Keres-Erinyes. 

To the primitive mind all diseases are caused by, or rather are, 
bad spirits. Porphyry'' tells us that blisters are caused by evil 

^ Orph. Hymn. xii. 

fKOe /noLKap, vovawv de\KT7)pia Travra. KOfil^iov ' 
e|Aacroi' 5e kukcls dras, kXclOov iv x^P'' TrdWiov, 
trrrjvoh r' iofi6\ois KTJfjas x^^^'"'^^ dTrdTTf/j-ire. 

- Ahrens, No. 99 b, 'Ilpa/cX^j 'IlTrtdXT/ra nvlywv. 

' 8.V. piyOTTVpfTOV. 

* Roscher, Lexicon s.v. Nosoi p. 459, see also Roscher, Ephialtes, Ahhandl. <L K. 
Sfichs. Ges. Phil. -Hist. Kl. xx. 1900. 

•'' Eur. I'hocn. 950 fxiXaivav Kfjp' dw^ o/x/xaffiv /SaXoii'. 

" Since I wrote the aViove much light has been thrown on the genesis of this 
primitive demonology by Mr F. M. Cornford in his Tluici/didea Mythixtoricm, 
Chapter xiii. 

'■ Wolff. Porphyr. De philos. ex orac. Ikiiiv. p. 119 = Eu8ebius Praep. Ev. 4. 23. 3 
KoX yap fxaXiffra raii 7roia?5 Tpo(f>ah xffl'poi'ff', cirovp-iviav yap i)p.G)v Trpocriaffi nal irpoaif'd- 
vovai T(2 ffw/xaTL. Kai oid tovto at dyixiai, ov 5id tovs Oeovi Trpoffrjyov/x^i'uii dW 'iv 
ovTOL dirodTdai' yudXiffra 5' oi'/uari xoipoi'C' xal Tah dxaOapcrlai^ Kai diro\avou(n tovtuu, 
(iabvvovTis Tois xp^f^^''^'-^- J-'hti word wpocr-qyovp.ivoi'i <loeH not ho far an 1 know occur 
elsewhere, it .seems from the context to mean 'inductively,' with a view to induce 
rather than expel. 



168 Demonology of Gliosis, Sjyntes, Bogeys [ch. 

spirits which come at us when we eat certain food and settle on 
our bodies. He goes to the very heart of ancient religious 'aversion' 
when he adds that it is on account of this that purifications are 
practised, not in order that we may induce the presence of the gods, 
but that these wretched things may keep off. He might have added, 
it is on account of these bad spirits that we fast ; indeed a'^veia, 
the word he uses, means abstinence as well as purity. Eating is 
highly dangerous because you have your mouth open and a Ker 
may get in. If a Ker should get in when you are about to 
partake of specially holy food there will naturally be difficulties. 
So argues the savage. Porphyry being a vegetarian says that these 
bad spirits specially delight in blood and impurities generally and 
they 'creep into people who make use of such things.' If you kept 
about you holy plants with strong scents and purging properties, 
like rue and buckthorn, you might keep the Keres away, or, if they 
got in, might speedily and safely eject them. 

The physical character of the Keres, their connection with 'the 
lusts of the flesh,' comes out very clearly in a quaint moralising 
poem preserved by Stobaeus and attributed to Linos. It deals 
with the dangers of Keres and the necessity for meeting them 
by ' purification.' Its ascetic tone and its attribution to Linos 
probably point to Orphic origin. It runs as follows ^ : 

'Hearken to these my sayings, zealously lend me yom- hearing 
To the simple truth about all things. Drive far away the disastrous 
Keres, they who destroy the herd of the vulgar and fetter 
All things around with curses manifold. Many and dreadful 
Shapes do they take to deceive. But keep them far from thy spirit, 
Ever watchful in mind. This is the purification 
That shall rightly and truly purge thee to sanctification 
(If but in truth thou hatest the baleful race of the Keres), 
And most of all thy belly, the giver of all things shameful, 
For desire is her charioteer and she drives with the driving of madness.' 

It is commonly said that diseases are ' personified ' by the 
Greeks. This is to invert the real order of primitive thought. 
It is not that a disease is realized as a power and then turned 

1 Stob. V. 22. Mvov. 

Kripas aTTcoadfievos TroXvirrj/movas ai re ^e^rfKwv 
ox^ov apiCTTuxrai drais wepi Travra weSuxTL 
TravToiais /j.op(pu)v xa^f'aij' airaT'qp.aT ^xoi'fi' 
ras ixev airo i/'i'X^s etpynv (pvkaKoiai voolo. 
oi'TOS yap are Ka0a.pp.os ovtojs diKaiivs focrtei'/crett, 
et K€u akrjdelrj /xicr^eis oXobv y^vos auTuiv, 
V7)5vv /xev irpLiTicrT' aiaxp'^v ddireLpav airdvTwi' 
ijv ewidvpla rjviox^^ p.apyoi<TL xaXtwrs. 



v] The Ker as Evil Sprite 169 

into a person, it is that primitive man seems unable to conceive of 

any force except as resulting from some person or being or sprite, 

something a little like himself. Such is the state of mind of the 

modern Greek peasant who writes XoXepa with a capital letter. 

Hunger, pestilence, madness, nightmare have each a sprite behind 

them : are all sprites. • 

Of course, as Hesiod^ knew, there were ancient golden days 

when these sprites were not let loose, when they were shut up 

safe in a pithos or large jar and 

' Of old the tribes of mortal men on earth 
Lived without ills, aloof ft-om grievous toil 
And catching plagues which Keres gave to men 2.' 

But alas ! 

'The woman with her hands took the great lid 
From off the jar and scattered them, and thus 
Devised sad cares for mortals. Hope alone 
Remained therein, safe held beneath the rim, 
Nor flitted forth, for she thrust to the lid^.' 

Who the woman was and why she opened the jar will be con- 
sidered later (p. 283) ; for the moment we have only to note what 
manner of things came out of it. The account is strange and 
significant. She shut the jar too late : 

'For other myriad evils wandered forth 
To man, the earth was full, and full the sea. 
Diseases, that all round by day and niglit 
Bring ills to mortals, hovered, self-impelled. 
Silent, for Zeus the Counsellor their voice 
Had taken away*.' 

Proclus understands that these silent ghostly insidious things 
are Keres, though he partly modernizes them. He says in com- 
menting on the passage, ' Hesiod gives them (i.e. the diseases) 
bodily form making them approach without sound, showing that 
even of these things spirits are the guardians, sending invisibly 

1 Hes. Erg. 90 

irplv fikv yap ^uifffKOf iiri x^o''' <l>vV avOpihtruv 
v6<t4>lv drep re kolkCiv kul Arep x^XfToro TrSvoio 
vov(Twv r' dpyoKiwv air' dvopdai Krjpai fSuKaf. 
^ I prefer to read : dcrr dvSpdat Krjpei ioujKav, i.e. ' grievous diseases which Keres 
gave to men,' but I have translated tlio text as it stands, since possibly Hesiod, 
though he clearly knew of a connection between vbaoi and Kjjpes, may have inverted 
cause and effect. I have already discussed the passage in the Journal of Hellenic 
Studies, XX. 1000, p. 104. 

^ Hes. Eri). 94. For Hope as an evil Ker, see Mr F. M. Cornford, Thucijdidcs 
M'jtliixtorirux, p. 224. 

■* Hes. Enj. 102. Procl. ad 102 iaconaTovoiricre 5i oi'tAs irpoaiovaai d<pu)i'ovt 
TTOiqaai (voeiKvu/j.d'oi 6tl Kal tovtwv lipopoi 5aliJ.ovi% tlcriv oi'rtcfj SpuKTif a<pat'wi 
iTnTrip.irovTi% rds vb<TOv% ras virb ttjv VAp.app.ivr)v TfTay/x^vai Kal rdt if ti^ 7ri(V xijpa^ 
OiaffirdpovTtf. 



170 Demonologij of Ghosts, Sjyrites, Bogeys [ch. 

the diseases decreed by fate and scattering the Keres in the jar.' 
After the manner of his day he thinks the Keres were presided 
over by spirits, that they were diseases sent by spirits, but primitive 
man believes the Keres are the spirits, are the diseases. Hesiod 
himself was probably not quite conscious that the jar or pithos 
was the great grave-jar of the Earth-mother Pandora (p. 286), 
and that the Keres were ghosts. ' Earth,' says Hesiod, ' was full 
and full the sea.' This crowd of Keres close-packed is oddly 
emphasized in a fragment by an anonymous poet ^ : 

' Such is our mortal state, ill upon ill, 
And round about us Keres crowding still ; 
No chink of opening 
Is left for entering.' 

This notion of the swarm of unknown unseen evils hovering about 

men haunts the lyric poets, lending a certain primitive reality 

to their vague mournful pessimism. Simonides of Amorgos- 

seems to echo Hesiod when he says ' hope feeds all men ' — but 

hope is all in vain because of the imminent demon host that work 

for man's undoing, disease and death and war and shipwreck 

and suicide. 

'No ill is lacking, Keres thousand-fold 
Mortals attend, woes and calamities 
That none may scape.' 

Here and elsewhere to translate ' Keres ' by fates is to make a 
premature abstraction. The Keres are still physical actual things 
not impersonations. So when Aeschylus^ puts into the mouth of 
his Danaid women the prayer 

'Nor may diseases, noisome swarm, 
Settle upon our heads, to harm 
Our citizens,' 

the ' noisome swarm ' is no mere ' poetical ' figure but the reflection 
of a real primitive conviction of live pests. 

The little fluttering insect-like diseases are naturally spoken of 

^ Frg. ap. Plot. Consol. ad ApoU. xxvi. Tt ovv; dpd y' rjfxecs rouro Sid rod \6yov 
fiadtiv ov dwd/Meda, ou5' eiriKoyiaacrdaL ; otl TrXeir) fiev yala kukuiv ir\dr) 5i dixKaaaa Kai 
TOLade dvqTolai. kolko. KaKQv d/UKpi re KTJpes eiXeOtrai, KeveTj 5' €i(jdv(ns ov5' aidipi. 
Bergk [Frg. adesp. 2 b) points out that Plutarch's second quotation is an elegiac 
couplet, and for the ms. aidepi reads 'AtSew. This gives no satisfactory sense. 
Mr Gilbert Murray reads dd^pi a conjecture made certain by a passage in the 
dialogue ' Theophrastos ' (p. 399 e) by Aeneas of Gaza, TrXrjprjs S^ /cat 17 77? Kal t) 
6a\a(Tffa Kal rd vTrb yy]v iravra' Kal tos ^(prj rts tQv wap'' rjpuv ao(pu>i> Kevbv ovSiv ovd' 
oaov ddipa Kal rpixa ^aXelv. 

- Simon. Amorg. i. 20. ^ Aesch. Snppl. 684. 



v] The Ker as Evil Sprite 171 

for the most part in the plural, but in the Philoctetes of Sophocles^ 
the festering sore of the hero is called 'an ancient Ker'; here 
again the usage is primitive rather than poetical. Viewing the 
Keres ' as little inherent physical pests,' we are not surprised to 
learn from Theognis^ that 

'For hapless man wine doth two Keres hold — 
Limb-slacking Thirst, Drunkenness overbold.' 

Nor is it man alone who is beset by these evil sprites. In 
that storehouse of ancient superstition, the Orphic Lithica'\ we 
hear of Keres who attack the fields. Against them the best 
remedy is the Lychnis stone, which was also good to keep off 
a hailstorm. 

' Lychnis, from pelting hail be thou our shield, 
Keep off the Keres who attack each field.' 

And Theophrastus^ tells us that each locality has its own Keres 
dangerous to plants, some coming from the ground, some from the 
air, some from both. Fire, also, it would seem, might be infested 
by Keres. A commentator on Philo says that it is important 
that no pi'ofane fire, i.e. such as is in ordinary use, should touch 
an altar because it may be contaminated by myriads of Keres^ 
Instructive too is the statement of Stesichorus", who according to 
tradition ' called the Keres by the name Telchines.' Eustathius 
in quoting the statement of Stesichorus adds as explanatory of 
Keres tck; (TKOT(o<Tei<; : the word a-Korcoo-ei'i is late and probably a 
gloss, it means darkening, killing, eclipse physical and spiritual. 
Leaving the gloss aside, the association of Keres with Telchines 
is of capital interest and takes us straight back into the world 
of ancient magic. The Telchines were the typical magicians of 
antiquity, and Strabo^ tells us that one of their magic arts was 

1 Soph. Phil 4. - Theog. 887. 

^ Orph. TAth. 268 Ai5x«") <^v 5' ^k iredlov p60i6i> t' airSepye xo-^^-i'"-" 
rifxeripov Kai Kijpas bcai (ttlx^^'^'-" f""' OL'/povs. 

•* Theophr. Be caus. pi. 5. 10. 4 iKaaroi rCov Tdvwv idias ^x^' fJ/'as, oi /x(v (k tov 
(oa.(povs oi 8' e.K tov dipos oi 5' e| ajxcpo'iv. 

'' OTTOis ^lr] iTpoadxpaiTO tov ^wfxov 8ia t6 fj.vpias itrws avan.ifw.xOo-1- Krjpai. Tins 
reference to Budaens's commentary on Philo Vita Mosi.i I borrow I'roiu the 
Thesaurus of Stephanos. In connection witli fire and fire-places the belief in 
Keres is not dead to-day. An Irish servant of miiir who faile<l to light a fire 
firmly declined to make a second attempt on the ground that she knew ' there 
was a little fairy in the grate.' The Ker in this case was, as often in iititi<piity, 
a malign draught. 

« Frg. ap. Eustath. 772. H. ^ xiv. 2. ti.W. 



172 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

to ' besprinkle animals and plants with the water of Styx and 
sulphur mixed with it, with a view to destroy them.' 

Thus the Keres, from being merely bad influences inherent 
and almost automatic, became exalted and personified into actual 
magicians. Eustathius in the passage where he quotes Stesichorus 
allows us to see how this happened. He is commenting on the 
ancient tribe of the Kouretes : these Kouretes, he says, were 
Cretan and also called Thelgines {sic), and they were sorcerers 
and magicians. 'Of these there were two sorts: one sort crafts- 
men and skilled in handiwork, the other sort pernicious to all 
good things ; these last were of fierce nature and were fabled to 
be the origins of squalls of wind, and they had a cup in which 
they used to brew magic potions from roots. They (i.e. the 
former sort) invented statuary and discovered metals, and they 
were amphibious and of strange varieties of shape, some were 
like demons, some like men, some like fishes, some like serpents ; 
and the story went that some had no hands, some no feet, 
and some had webs between their fingers like geese. And they 
say that they were blue-eyed and black-tailed.' Finally comes 
the significant statement that they perished struch doiun by the 
thunder of Zeus or by the arrows of Apollo. The old order is 
slain by the new. To the imagination of the conqueror the 
conquered are at once barbarians and magicians, monstrous and 
magical, hated and feared, craftsmen and medicine men, demons, 
beings endowed like the spirits they worship, in a word Keres- 
Telchines^ When we find the good, fruitful, beneficent side 
of the Keres effaced and ignored we must always remember 
this fact that we see them through the medium of a conquering 
civilization -. 

The Keres of Old Age and Death. 

By fair means or foul, by such ritual procedures as have already 
been noted, by the chewing of buckthorn, the sounding of brass, 

1 Professor Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece, i. p. 177. 

- As evidence of the evil reputation of Keres Mr Gilbert Murray calls my 
attention to the pun in Eur. Tro. 424 which seems to have escaped the attention 
of commentators: 

Ti TTor' ^x""""' Toiivofia; 
KTipvKes, ^v aTrex^^VI^^ irayKnivov ^porots. 
'What name have they? A A'oish name.' Hermes as KT)pv^ invokes and revokes 
KTJpes with his KijpvKeiov, see pp. 26 and 43. 



v] The Keres of Old Age and Death 173 

the making of comic figures, most of the Keres could be kept at 

bay; but there were two who waited relentless, who might not be 

averted, and these were Old Age and Death. It is the thought 

that these two Keres are waiting that with the lyric poets most of 

all overshadows the brightness of life. Theognis' prays to Zeus : 

' Keep far the evil Keres, me defend 
From Old Age wasting, and from Death the end.' 

These haunting Keres of disease, disaster, old age and death 

Mimnermus- can never forget: 

'We blossom like the leaves that come in spring, 
What time the sun begins to flame and glow, 
And in the brief span of youth's gladdening 
Nor good nor evil from the gods we know, 
But always at the goal black Keres stand 
Holding, one grievous Age, one Death within her hand. 

And all the fruit of youth wastes, as the Sun 

Wastes and is spent in sunbeams, and to die 
Not live is best, for evils many a one 

Are born within the soul. And Poverty 
Has wasted one man's house with niggard care. 

And one has lost his children. Desolate 
Of this his earthly longing, he must fare 

To Hades. And ant>ther for his fate 
Has sickness sore that eats his soul. No man 
Is there but Zeus hath cursed with many a ban.' 

Here is the same dismal primitive faith, or rather fear. All 
things are beset by Keres, and Keres are all evil. The verses of 
Mimnermus are of interest at this point because they show the 
emergence of the two most dreaded Keres, Old Age and Death, 
from the swarm of minor ills. Povei'ty, disease and desolation are 
no longer definitely figured as Keres. 

The vase-painter shows this fact in a cruder form. On a red- 
figured amphora (fig. 17) in the Louvre^ Hcrakles is represented 
lifting his club to slay a shrivelled ugly little figure leaning on 
a stick — the figure obviously is an old man. Fortunately it is 
inscribed yrjpa^;. It is not an old man, but Old Age itself, the 
dreaded Ker. The representation is a close parallel to Herakles 
slaying the Ker in fig. 16. The Ker of Old Age has no wings: 
these the vase-painter rightly felt were inappropriate. It is in 
fact a Kor developed one step further into an impersonation. 
The vase may be safely dated as belonging to about the middle 
of the oth century B.C. It is analogous in style, as in subject, 

1 Theo^,'. 707. '^ MiiniienuuH, 2. 

■' Pettier, Cat. U'^i. 1'. JIaitung, ridlolufjos, l. (N.F. iv. 2) Taf. i. 



174 Demonology of Ghosts, S^^rUes, Bogeys [ch. 

to an amphora^ in the British Museum bearing the love-name 
Charmides. 

Gradually the meanings of Ker became narrowed down to one, 
to the great evil, death and the fate of death, but always with a 




Fig. 17. 

flitting remembrance that there were Keres of all mortal things. 
This is the usage most familiar to us, because it is Homeric. 
Homer's phraseology is rarely primitive — often fossilized — and 
the regularly recurring 'Ker of death 2' (ktjp Oavdroio) is heir to 
a long ancestry. In Homer we catch the word Ker at a moment 
of transition ; it is half death, half death-spirit. Odysseus'* says 
' Death and the Ker avoiding, we escape,' 

where the two words death and Ker are all but equivalents : 
they are both death and the sprite of death, or as we might say 

1 Cat. e290. Cecil Smith, J.H.S. 188.3, PI. xxx. p. 96. 
^ Od. XI. 398 T/s vv ffe Krjp eSa/j-acrcre TavTi\e-y^os davaroio. 
* Od. XII. 158 "H Kev dXeutiyaej'oi davarov Kai Krjpa (pvyuifxev , 



v] The Ker of Death 175 

now-a-days death and the angel of death. Homer's conception so 
dominates our minds that the custom has obtained of uniformly 
translating 'Ker' by fate, a custom that has led to much confusion 
of thought. 

Two things with respect to Homer's usage must be borne in 
mind. First, his use of the word Ker is, as might be expected, far 
more abstract and literary than the usage Ave have already noted. 
It is impossible to say that Homer has in his mind anything of the 
nature of a tiny winged bacillus. Second, in Homer Ker is almost 
always defined and limited by the genitive davdroLo, and this 
looks as though, behind the expression, there lay the half-conscious 
knowledge that thei'e were Keres of other things than death. 
Ker itself is not death, but the two have become well-nigh 
inseparable. 

Some notion of the double nature, good and bad, of Keres seems 
to survive in the expression two-fold Keres {hixdahiai Kj/pe?). 
Achilles ^ says : 

' My goddess-mother silver-footed Thetis 
Hath said that Keres two-fold bear me on 
To the term of death.' 

It is true that both the Keres are carrying him deathward, but 
there is strongly present the idea of the diversity of fates. The 
English language has in such cases absolutely no equivalent for 
Ker, because it has no word weighted with the like associations. 

In one passage only in the fliad', i.e. the description of the 
shield of Achilles, does a Ker actually appear in person, on the 
battlefield : 

'And in the tliick of battle there was Strife 
And Clamour, and there too the baleful Ker. 
She grasped one man alive, with bleeding wound, 
Another still unwounded, and one dead 
She by his feet dragged through the throng. And red 
Her raiment on her shoulders with men's blood.' 

A work of art, it must be remembered, is being described, and the 
feeling is more Hesiodic than Homeric. The Ker is in this case 
not a fate but a horrible she-demon of slaughter. 

1 II. IX. 410. = //• XVIII. 535. 



176 Demoiiology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

The Ker as Harpv and Wind-demon. 

In Homer the Keres are no doubt mainly death-spirits, but 
they have another function, they actually carry off the souls to 
Hades, Odysseus says ^ : 

' Howbeit him Death-Keres carried off 
To Hades' house.' 

It is impossible here to translate Keres by ' fates,' the word is too 
abstract : the Keres are irpoaTroXoL, angels, messengers, death- 
demons, souls that carry off souls. 

The idea that underlies this constantly recurring formulary, 
KTJpc'i e^av davdroio (^epovcrat, emerges clearly when we come to 
consider those analogous apparitions, the Harpies. The Harpies 
betray their nature clearly in their name, in its uncontracted form 
''ApeTTuta,' which appears on the vase-painting in fig. 18; they 
are the Snatchers, winged women-demons, hurrying along like 
the storm wind and carrying all things to destruction. The vase- 
painting in fig. 18 from a large black-figured vessel in the Berlin 




Fig. 18. 



Museum - is specially instructive because, though the winged 
demons are inscribed as Harpies, the scene of which they form 



' Od. XIV. 207. 



2 Cat. 1682, Arch. Zeit. 1882, PI. 9. 



V] 



The Ker as Harpy 



17 



part, i.e. the slaying of Medusa, clearly shows that they are 
Gorgons ; so uear akin, so shifting and intermingled are the two 
conceptions. On another vase (fig. 19), also in the Berlin Museum^ 




Fig. 19. 

we see an actual Gorgon with the typical Gorgon's head and 
protruding tongue performing the function of a Harpy, i.e. of a 
Snatcher. We say 'an actual Gorgon,' but it is not a Gorgon of 
the usual form but a bird-woman 
with a Gorgon's head. The bird- 
woman is currently and rightly as- 
sociated with the Siren, a creature 
to be discussed later (p. 197), a crea- 
ture malign though seductive in 
Homer, but gradually softened by the 
Athenian imagination into a sorrow- 
ful death angel. 

The tender bird-women of the so- 
called 'Harpy tomb' from Lycia (fig. 
20), now in the British Museum, 
perform the functions of a Harpy, but 
very gently. They are at least near 
akin to the sorrowing Sirens on Athe- 
nian tombs. We can scarcely call them 




J'lu. -20. 



1 cm. 2157, JahrbiicU d. Arch. Iii.^l. i. !>. 210. 



H. 



12 



178 Demonology q/ Ghosts, Sjyrites, Bogeys [ch. 

by the harsh name of the 'Snatchers.' And yet, standing as it did in 
Lycia, this ' Harpy tomb ' may be the outcome of the same stratum 
of mythological conceptions as the familiar story of the daughters 
of the Lycian Pandareos. Penelope' in her desolation cries aloud: 

'Would that the storm might snatch me adown its dusky way 
And cast me forth where Ocean is outpour'd with ebbing spray, 
As when Pandareos' daughters the storm winds bore away,' 

and then, harking back, she tells the ancient Lycian story of the 
fair nurture of the princesses, and how Aphrodite went to high 
Olympus to plan for them a goodly marriage. But whom the 
gods love die young: 

'Meantime the Harpies snatched away the maids, and gave them o'er 
To the hatefvd ones, the Erinyes, to serve them evermore^.' 

Early death was figured b}^ the primitive Greek as a snatching 
away by^ evil death-demons, storm-ghosts. These snatchers he 
called Harpies, the modern Greek calls them Nereids. In Homer's 
lines we seem to catch the winds as snatchers, half-way to their 
full impersonation as Harpies. To give them a capital letter is to 
crystallize their personality prematurel}^ Even when they become 
fully persons, their name carried to the Greek its adjectival sense 
now partly lost to us. 

Another function of the Harpies links them very closely- with 
the Keres, and shows in odd and instructive fashion the animistic 
habit of ancient thought. The Harpies not only snatch away 
souls to death but they give life, bringing things to birth. A 
Harpy was the mother by Zephyros of the horses of Achilles^. 
Both parents are in a sense winds, only the Harpy wind halts 
between horse and woman. By winds as Vergil tells us mares 
became pregnant^. 



1 Od. XX. 66 



Od. XX. 77 



17 ^TTHTa. yn' avapird^aaa OveWa 
oXxoLTO wpo(p€povaa Kar' rjepoevra K^XevOa 
ev TTpoxoys de j3d\oi d\popp6ov 'ilKeavoio, 
(is 5' ore TLavdapiov Kovpas dveXofTo OveWai. 



T6(ppa 5i Tcts Kotjpas dpirviai. dv-qpelij/avTO 

Kai p eSoaav arvyeprjaLv ipivvcnv dfji,(pnro\€V€iv. 

^ Iliad XVI. 1-50. 

4 Georg. iii. 274 

saepe sine ullis 
conjugiis vento gravidas, mirabile dictu. 



V] 



The Ker as Wind-demon 



179 



As such a Harpy, half horse, half Gorgon-woman, Medusa is 
represented on a curious Boeotian vase (tig. 21) of very archaic 




Fig. 21. 

style now in the Louvre ^ The representation is instructive, it 
shows how in art as in literature the types of Gorgon and Harpy 
were for a time in flux ; a particular artist could please his own 
fancy. The horse Medusa was apparently not a success, for she did 
not survive. 

It is easy enough to see how winds were conceived of as 
Snatchers, death-demons, but why should they impregnate, give 
life ? It is not, I think, by a mere figure of speech that breezes 
{-nvoiai) are spoken of as 'life-begetting' (^cooyovoc) and 'soul- 
rearing ' (\lrvxoTp6(f)oc). It is not because they are in our sense life- 
giving and refreshing as well as destructive: the truth lies deeper 
down. Only life can give life, only a soul gives birth to a soul ; the 
winds ewe souls as well as breaths {-nvevfjiara). Elere as so often we 
get at the real truth through an ancient Athenian cultus practice. 
When an Athenian was about to be married he prayed and 
sacrificed, Suidas tells us, to the Tritopatores. The statement is 
quoted from Phanodemas who wrote a book on Attic Matter s'\ 

1 Bull, (le Con: Hell. xxii. 1898, PI. v. 

- SuidaB H.v. Tritopatores. <i>av6o7;/jioi 5i ev ^Krcp (p-q<xiv on ixovoi 'AOrji/aloi Ot'oixxl 
Tf Kal (Oxourai avrois virip yeviaews iraloojn brav ya/jKLu /m^Wiocnf. tv S( Tifi 'i)ptj>iu}i 

'i'vaiKi^ dvo/J.d^€<T$ai tovs T/jiTOTrdropfi? 'AuaXKelorji' Kal UpujTOK\^a sal IlpwroxXtocra 

Ovpupoiis Kal tpvXaKai elvaL tQu dvi/xuv a u»i .-iupra Arjixuv iv rji W.tOL5i </>r}alv dv^/xous 
dvai rous TpLTOTrdropas' 't'i\6xopos oi roi)s TpiTOTrdrpeis trdvTuv yeyof^vai wpJjTovi. rifv 

p.h yap yqv Kal tw -qXiov, (p-qcrif yofeis avrQf qirlcFTavTo ol Tore (Li'Opurrot Tors 5^ (K 

TovTuv Tpirovs wurdpas. 

12—2 



180 Demonologij of Ghosts, Sjfrites, Bogeys [ch. 

Suidas tells us also who the Tritopatores were. They were, as we 
might guess from their name, fathers in the third degree, fore- 
fathers, ancestors, ghosts, and Demon in his Atthis said they were 
winds. To the winds, it has already been seen (p. 67), are offered 
such expiatory sacrifices (acpdjia) as are due to the spirits of the 
underworld. The idea that the Tritopatores were winds as well as 
ghosts was never lost. To Photius and Suidas they are 'lords of 
the W'inds'and the Orphics make them 'gate-keepers and guardians 
of the winds.' From ghosts of dead men, Hippocrates^ tells us, 
came nurture aud growth and seeds, and the author of the 
Geoponica^ says that winds give life not only to plants but to all 
things. It was natural enough that the winds should be divided 
into demons beneficent and maleficent, as it depends where you 
live wliether a wind from a particular quarter will do yuu good 
or ill. 

In the black-figured vase-painting in fig. 22, found at Naukratis 
and now in the British Museum-, a local nymph is depicted: only 




Fig. 22. 



the lower part of her figure is left us, drapery, the ends of her long 

^ Hipp. Ilepi evvTTv. ii. p. 14 airb yap tuv airoOauovTuv al Tpofpai Kal av^-rjcreLS Kal 
ffw^pfiara. 

^ Geop. IX. 3 oil to. (pira /xovov dWa Kai Travra fwoyovovcri. 
3 Cat. B 4. 



y] The Ker as Wind-demon 181 

hair and her feet, but she must be the nymph Gyrene beloved of 
Apollo, for close to her and probably held in her hand is a great 
branch of the silphium plant. To the right of her, approaching to 
minister or to worship, are winged genii. It is the very image of 
depaireta, tendance, ministration, fostering care, worship, all in one. 
The genii tend the nymph who is the land itself, her and her 
products. The figures to the right are bearded: they can scarcely 
be other than the spirits of the North wind, the Boreadae, 
the cool healthful wind that comes over the sea to sun-burnt 
Africa. If these be Boreadae, the opposing figures, beardless and 
therefore almost certainly female, are Harpies, demons of the 
South wind, to Africa the wind coming across the desert and 
bringing heat and blight and pestilence ^ 

It might be bold to assert so much, but for the existence of 
another representation on a situla from Daphnae (fig. 23), also, 
happily for comparison, in the British Museum-. On 
the one side, not figured here, is a winged bearded 
figure ending in a snake, probably Boreas : such a 
snake-tailed Boreas was seen by Pausanias^ on the 
chest of Cypselus in the act of seizing Oreithyia. 
There is nothing harsh in the snake tail for Boreas, 
for the winds, as has already been noted (p. 68), were 
regarded as earth-born. Behind Boreas is a plant in ^^^- '■^^■ 
blossom rising from the ground, a symbol of the vegetation 
nourished by the North wind. On the reverse (fig. 24) is a winged 
figure closely like the left hand genii of the Gyrene cylix, and this 
figure drives in front of it destructive creatures, a locust, the pest 
of the South, two birds of prey attacking a hare, and a third that 
is obviously a vulture. The two representations taken together 
justify us in regarding the left hand genii as destructive. Taking 
these two representations together with a third vase-painting, the 
celebrated Phineus cylix^ we are further justified in calling these 
destructive wind-demons Harpies. On this vase" the Boreadae, 
Zetes and Kalai.s, show their true antagonism. The Harpies have 

' The full interpretation of the Cyrone vase is due to Mr Cecil Smith. Jouriuil 
of Ilellciiir Studii'x, p. 108, 'HarpieHin Greek Art.' The vase in ropmclucetl and 
discusBed, but only with partial succcbs, by I)r Studnic/ka in his Ki/rciu', p. IH. 

'■^ Cat. li 104. 

* P. V. 19. 1 liop^as ((JtIv r)pira.KU3S 'ilpflOviav, ovpal di 6<t>(wv avri iro^Qiv tlalv avTi^. 

•* Wiirzburt,', no. Soi. ° Iteproduced later, lig. 40. 




182 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

fouled the food of Phineus like the pestilential winds they were, 
and the clean clear sons of the North wind give chase. It is 




Fig. 24. 



seldom that ancient art has preserved for us so clear a picture of 
the duality of things. 

On black-figured vase-paintings little winged figures occur not 
unfrequently to which it is by no means easy to give a name. In 




Fig. 25. 



fig. 25 we have such a representation^ — Europa seated on the bull 

passes in rapid flight over the sea, which is indicated by fishes and 

1 Cecil Smith, J.H.S. xiii. p. 112, fig. 2. 



v] The Ker as Fate 183 

dolphins. lu front of her flies a vulture-like bird, behind comes a 
■svinged figure holding two wreaths. Is she Nike, bringing good 
success to the lover ? is she a favouring wind speeding the flight ? 
I incline to think the vase-painter did not clearly discriminate. 
She is a sort of good Ker, a fostering favouring influence. In all 
these cases of early genii it is important to bear in mind that the 
sharp distinction between moral and physical influence, so natural 
to the modern mind, is not yet established. 

We return to the Keres from which the wind demons sprang. 

The Ker as Fate. 

One Homeric instance of the use of Ker remains to be ex- 
amined. When Achilles^ had the fourth time chased Hector 
round the walls of Troy, Zeus was wearied and 

' Hung up his golden scales and in them set 
Twain Keres, fates of death that lays men low.' 

This weighing of Keres, this ' Kerostasia,' is a weighing of death 
fates, but it is interesting to find that it reappears under another 
name, i.e. the ' Psychostasia,' the weighing of souls. We know 
from Plutarch- that Aeschylus wrote a play with this title. The 
subject was the weighing of the souls or lives not of Hector 
and Achilles, but Achilles and Memnon. This is certain because, 
Plutarch says, he placed at either side of the scales the mothers 
Thetis and Eos praying for their sons. Pollux* adds that Zeus 
and his attendants were suspended from a crane. In the scene 
of the Kerostasia as given by Quintus Smyrnaeus'*, a scene which 
probably goes back to the earlier tradition of 'Arctinos,' it is 
noticeable that Memnon the loser has a swarthy Ker while Achilles 
the winner has a bright cheerful one, a fact which seems to anti- 
cipate the white and black Erinyes. 

The scene of the Psychostasia or Kerostasia, as it is variously 
called, appears on several vase-paintings, one of which from the 

» II. XXII. '208. - Plut. Moral, p. 17 a. -' Poll. Onomist. iv. 130. 

* Post-Horn. II. 509 

5oial dp' an(t>(yripoi(Ti deuv iK^repde irapiffTav 
K^pes- ipeixva'ir) fikv t^t) worl 'yUfivovos TjTop 
<paiOpr] 5' a./j.<li' 'Ax'^^'* oai(ppova. 
Mr T. R. Glover, in the chapter on Quintus SmyrnaeUH in his J/iJ> ami I.rtt,-r.i 
in the Fourth (Jentiiri/, points out that the Keres in the poem of Quintus liave 
developed a supremacy unknown to Homer, they are a<^i'KTOt— even tlie K«>ds cannot 
check them. They are by-forms of Aisa and Moira. 



184 Demonology of Gliosis, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 




Fig. 26. 



British Museum^ is reproduced in fig. 26. Hermes holds the 
scales, in either scale 
is the Ker or eidolon of 
one of the combatants ; 
the lekythos is black- 
figured, and is our 
earliest source for the 
Kerostasia. The Keres 
or yjrvxai are repre- 
sented as miniature 

men, it is the lives rather than the fates that are Aveighed. So 
the notion shifts. 

In Hesiod, as has already been noted (p. 169), the Keres are 
more primitive and actual, they are in a sense fates, but they 
are also little winged spirits. But Hesiod is Homer-ridden, so 
we get the ' black Ker,' own sister to Thanatos and hateful Moros 
(Doom) and Sleep and the tribes of Dreams^ We get also^ the 
dawnings of an Erinys, of an avenging fate, though the lines look 

like an interpolation : 

'Night bore 
The Avengers and the Keres pitiless.' 

Hesiod goes on to give the names usually associated with the 
Fates, Klotho, Lachesis, Atropos, and says they 

' To mortals at their birth 
Give good and evil both.' 

Whether interpolated or not the passage is significant both be- 
cause it gives to the Keres the functions Homer allotted to the 
Erinyes, and also because with a reminiscence of earlier thought 
it makes them the source of good and of evil. It is probably this 
last idea that is at the back of the curious Hesiodic epithet 
KripiTpe(f)rj<;, which occurs in the Works and Days^ : 

'Then, when the dog-star comes and shines by day 
For a brief space over the heads of men 
Ker-nourished.' 

1 Cat. B 639; Murray, Hist, of Greek Sculjiture, vol. ii. p. 28. Dr Murray 
cites this vase as an instance of primitive perspective. Hermes, depicted in an 
impossible position, actually between the two advancing combatants, is thought 
of as in the background. 

2 Hes. Theog. 211. « Theofj. 217 ff. 

* Hes. Erf/. 416. The only other passage in which this difficult word occurs is 
in one of the oracles collected in the awayoiyq of Mnaseas (3rd cent, b.c.) and 
preserved for us by the scholiast on the Fhoenissae of Euripides (ad v. 638, 



v] The Ker as Fate 185 

'Men nourished for death' assuredly is not the nieaniug; the idea 
seems to be that each man has a Ker within him, a thing that 
nourishes him, keeps him alive, a sort of fate as it were on w^hich 
his life depends. The epithet might come to signify something 
like mortal, subject to, depending on fate. If this be the meaning 
it looks back to an early stage of things when the Ker had not been 
specialized down to death and was not wholly ' black,' when it was 
more a man's luck than his ftite, a sort of embryo Genius. 

Kr)pLTpe(f>i]<;, Ker-nourished, would then be the antithesis of 
KT]pi(f)aTo<; 'slain by Keres,' which Hesychius' explains as those 
who died of disease ; and would look back to a primitive double- 
ness of functions when the Keres were demons of all work. In 
vague and fitful fashion they begin where the Semnae magnifi- 
cently end, as Moirae with control over all human weal and woe. 

'These for their guerdon hold dominion 
O'er all things mortal 2.' 

In such returning cycles runs the w^heel of theology. 

But the black side of things is always, it would seem, most 

impressive to primitive man. Given that the Ker was a fate of 

death, almost a personified death, it was fitting and natural that 

it should be tricked out with ever increasing horrors. Hesiod, 

or the Avriter of the Shield, with his rude peasant imagination 

was ready for the task. The Keres of Pandora's jar are purely 

primitive, and quite natural, not thought out at all: the Keres 

of the Shield are a literary effort and much too horrid to be 

frightening. Behind the crowd of old men praying with uplifted 

hands for their fighting^ children stood 

' The })lue-l )lack Keres, grinding their white teeth, 
Glaring and grim, bloody, insatiable ; 
They strive round those that fall, greedy to drink 
Black blood, and whomsoever first they found 
Low lying with fresh wounds, about his flesh 
A Ker would lay long claws, and his soul pass 
To Hades and cliill gloom of Tartarus-'.' 

Miiller F.H.G. 3, p. 157) where Kadmos is told to >^o on ' till he comes to the herds 
of the Ker-nourished Pelagon ' {KrjpiTpecp^os UeXdyopTos). Here it looks as if the 
epithet indicated prosperity, the man nourished and favoured and clierished by the 
Keres, see Koscher, Lexicon, s.v. Kadmos, p. 831, and a. v. Keres, p. 1139, but it is 
possible that, as suggested to me by Mr Cornford, the word may liave been coined by 
Hesiod in bitter parody of the Honn-ric AioTp«prii. The notion of the evil wasting 
action of Kens comes out in the word K-qpaivw, as in Eur. Ilipii. 223 rl wot', w 
TiKvov, Taoi KTjpalvdi, and more physically in Aesch. Sujfp. SiiCJ OTJpfS Si Krjpalvovcn. 

' Hesych. s.v. oaoi fiery rtdv-qKaffiv. - Aesch. Kum. '.i30. 

» Hes. Scut. 249. 



186 Demonology of Ghosts, Sjyrites, Bogeys [oh. 

Pausanias^ in his description of the chest of Cypsehis tells 
of the figure of a Ker which is thoroughly Hesiodic in character. 
The scene is the combat between Eteokles and Polyneikes ; 
Polyneikes has fallen on his knees and Eteokles is rushing at 
him. ' Behind Polyneikes is a woman-figure with teeth, as cruel 
as a wild beast's, and her finger-nails are hooked. An inscription 
near her says that she is a Ker, as though Polyneikes were 
carried off by Fate, and as though the end of Eteokles were in 
accordance with justice.' Pausanias regards the word Ker as 
the equivalent of Fate, but we must not impose a conception 
so abstract on the primitive artist who decorated the chest. 

We are very far from the little fluttering ghosts, the winged 
bacilli, but there is a touch of kinship with those other ghosts 
who in the Nekuia draw nigh to drink the black blood (p. 75), 
and — a forecast of the Erinyes — the 'blue-black"' Keres are near 
akin to the horrid Hades demon painted by Polygnotus on the 
walls of the Lesche at Delphi. Pausanias^ says, ' Above the 
figures I have mentioned (i.e. the sacrilegious man, etc.) is Eur}-- 
nomos ; the guides of Delphi say that Eur^^nomos is one of the 
demons in Hades, and that he gnaws the flesh of the dead 
bodies, leaving only the bones. Homer's poem about Odysseus, 
and those called the Mini/as and the Hostoi, though they all make 
mention of Hades and its terrors, know no demon Eurynomos. 
I will therefore say this much, I will describe what sort of a person 
Eurynomos is and in what fashion he appears in the painting. The 
colour is blue-black {/cvavov ti-jv ')(^p6av fjuera^v ecrri kuI jxeXavo^) 
like the colour of the flies that settle on meat ; he is showing his 
teeth and is seated on the skin of a vulture.' The Keres of the 
Shield are human vultures; Eurynomos is the sarcophagus in- 
carnate, the great carnivorous vulture of the underworld, the flesh- 
eater grotesquely translated to a world of shadows. He rightly 
sits upon a vulture's skin. Such figures, Pausanias truly observes, 
are foreign to the urbane Epic. But rude primitive man, when 

^ P. V. 19. 6 Tov WoXvvdKovs 5e Sinadev ecrrriKev dSovras re ^xoi/cra ovdiv ij/xepwripov^ 
Brjpiov /cat ol /cat tQv xupwv elalv eTriKa/xirets oi ovvxi^' eTriypafx/jLa 5e ejr' avry elval 
(prjffi. Kijpa, tis t6v /ul^v vtto tov lleTrpufiivov rbv YioXweiK-qv aTraxOevTa, 'Ereo/cXet 5e 
yevofiivTis /cat avv t(2 BiKaiip rijs reXevTjjs. 

- Blue-black, Kvdveos, remained the traditional colour of the underworld, as in 
the Alcestis of Euripides (v. 262) : 

iitt' ocppvoL Kvavavyiai 
/SX^TToj;' TrrepcoTos — tat5os+. 
3 P. X. 28. 4. 



y] The Ker as Gorgon 187 

he sees a skeleton, asks who ate the flesh ; the answer is ' a Ker.' 
We are in the region of mere rude bogeydom, the land of Gorgo, 
Empusa, Lamia and Sphinx, and, strange though it may seem, 
of Siren. 

To examine severally each of these bogey forhis would lead 
too far afield, but the development of the types of Gorgon, Siren 
and Sphinx both in art and literature is so instructive that at the 
risk of digression each of these forms must be examined some- 
what in detail. 

The Ker as Gorgon. 

The Gorgons are to the modern mind three sisters of whom 
one, most evil of the three. Medusa, was slain by Perseus, and her 
lovely terrible face had power to turn men into stone. 

The triple form is not primitive, it is merely an instance of a 
general tendency', to be discussed later — a tendency which makes 
of each woman-goddess a trinity, which has given us the Horae, 
the Charites, the Semnae, and a host of other triple groups. It is 
immediately obvious that the triple Gorgons are not really three 
but one + two. The two unslain sisters are mere superfluous 
appendages due to convention ; the real Gorgon is Medusa. It is 
equally apparent that in her essence Medusa is a head and nothing 
more ; her potency only begins when her head is severed, and that 
potency resides in the head ; she is in a Avord a mask with a body 
later appended. The primitive Greek knew that there was in his 
ritual a horrid thing called a Gorgoneion, a grinning mask with 
glaring eyes and protruding beast-like tusks and pendent tongue. 
How (lid this Gorgoneion come to be ? A hero had slain a beast 
called the Gorgon, and this was its head. Thougii many other 
associations gathered round it, the basis of the Gorgoneion is a 
cultus object, a ritual mask misunderstood. The ritual object 
comes first; then the monster is begotten to account for it; then 
the hero is supplied to account for the slaying of the monster. 

Ritual masks are part of the appliances of most primitive 
cults. They are the natural agents of a religion of fear and 
'riddance.' Most anthropological museums' contain specimens 

' Adniirable specimens of flavage diincint^'-mnsks witli Medusa-like tougue aud 
tusks are exhibited in tlie Berlin Muscium t'iir Volkerkiinde. 



188 Demonology of Ghosts, Sjmtes, Bogeys [ch. 

of ' Gorgoneia ' still in use among savages, Gorgoneia which 
are veritable Medusa heads in every detail, glaring eyes, pendent 
tongue, protruding tusks. The function of such masks is perma- 
nently to 'make an ugly face,' at you if you are doing wrong, 
breaking your word, robbing your neighbour, meeting him in 
battle ; foi' you if you are doing right. 

Scattered notices show us that masks and faces were part of the 
apparatus of a religion of terror among the Greeks. There was, we 
learn from the lexicographers \ a goddess Praxidike, Exactress of 
Vengeance, whose images were heads only, and her sacrifices the like. 
By the time of Pausanias- this head or mask goddess had, like the 
Erinys, taken on a multiple, probably a triple form. At Haliartos in 
Boeotia he saw in the open air 'a sanctuary of the goddesses whom 
they call Praxidikae. Here the Haliartans swear, but the oath is not 
one that they take lightly.' In like manner at ancient Pheneus, 
there was a thing called the Petroma* which contained a mask of 
Demeter with the surname of Kidaria : by this Petroma most of 
the people of Pheneus swore on the most important matters. If the 
mask like its covering were of stone, such a stone-mask may well 
have helped out the legend of Medusa. The mask enclosed in the 
Petroma was the vehicle of the goddess : the priest put it on when 
he performed the ceremony of smiting the Underground Folk with 
rods. 

The use of masks in regular ritual was probably a rare survival, 
and would persist only in remote regions, but the common people 
were slow to lose their faith in the apotropaic virtue of an ' ugly 
face.' Fire was a natural terror to primitive man and all operations 
of baking beset by possible Keres. Therefore on his ovens he 
thought it well to set a Gorgon mask. In fig. 27, a portable oven 
now in the museum at Athens^, the mask is outside guarding the 
entrance. In fig. 28 the upper part of a similar oven is shown, 
and inside, where the fire flames up, are set three masks. These 
ovens are not very early, but they are essentially primitive. The 
face need not be of the type we call a Gorgon. In fig. 29 we have 
a Satyr type, bearded, with stark upstanding ears and hair, the 



1 Hesych. s.v., Photius s.v. 

- P. VIII. 15. 3, see Dr Frazer ad loc. ^ P. viii. 15. 3. 

■* For these ovens see Conze, ' Griechische Kohlenbecken,' Jahrbuch d. Inst., 
1890, Taf. I. and ii., and Furtwiingler, op. cit. 1891, p. 110. 



V] 



The Ker as Gorgo)i 



189 




Fig. 27. 



i„ 




Fig. 28. 





\ :/ y 



Fig. 2y. 



Fio, 30. 



190 Demonolofjy of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

image of fright set to frighten the frightful. It might be the 
picture of Phobos himself. In fig. 30 we have neither Gorgon 
nor Satyr but that typical bogey of the workshop, the Cyclops. 
He wears the typical workman's cap, and to either side are set 
the thunderbolts it is his business to forge. The craftsman is 
regarded as an uncanny bogey himself, cunning over-much, often 
deformed, and so he is good to frighten other bogeys. The Cyclops 
was a terror even in high Olympus. Callimachus^ in his charming 
way tells how 

' Even the little goddesses are in a dreadful fright ; 
If one of them will not be good, up in Olynipos' height, 
Her mother calls a Cyclops, and there is sore disgrace. 
And Hermes goes and gets a coal, and blacks his dreadful face, 
And down the chimney comes. She runs straight to her mother's lap, 
And shuts her eyes tight iu her hands for fear of dire mishap.' 

This fear of the bogey that beset the potter, and indeed beset 
every action, even the simplest, of human life, is very well shown 
in the Hymn- ' The Oven, or the Potters,' which shows clearly the 
order of beings against which the ' ngly face' was efficacious : 

' If you but pay me my hire, potters, I sing to command. 
Hither, come hither, Athene, bless with a fostering hand 
Furnace and potters and pots, let the making and baking go well ; 
Fair shall they stand in the streets and the market, and quick shall 

they sell, 
Great be the gain. But if at your peril you cheat me my price. 
Tricksters by birth, then straight to the furnace I call in a trice 
Mischievous imps one and all. Crusher and Crasher by name. 
Smasher and Half-bake and Him-who-burns-with-Unquenchable-Flame, 
They shall scorch up the house and the furnace, ruin it, bring it to nought. 
Wail shall the potters and snort shall the furnace, as horses do snort.' 

How real was the belief in these evil sprites and in the power to 
avert them by magic and apotropaic figures is seen on a fragment 
of early Corinthian pottery^ now in the Berlin Museum reproduced 
in fig. 31. Here is the great oven and here is the potter hard at 
work, but he is afraid in his heart, afraid of the Crusher and the 
Smasher and the rest. He has done what he can ; a great owl is 
perched on the oven to protect it, and in front he has put a little 
ugly comic man, a charm to keep off evil spirits : he might have 
put a Satyr- head-* or a Gorgoneion; he often did put both; it is all 

1 Callim. Hijm. ad Dian. 67, and see Jlytlis of the Odij'fsetj, p. 26. 
- Horn. Epigr. xiv. Kd/nLvos t) Kepafiels. 

■* Pernice, Festschrift filr Benndorf, p. 75. The inscnptions are not yet 
satisfactorily explained. 

■* A satyr-mask ou an oven is figured in my Greek Vase-paintings, p. 9, fig. 1. 



V] 



The Ker as Govifon 



191 



the same. Pollux' tells us it was tlie custom to put such comic 
figures (yeXola) before bronze-foundries; they could be either hung 
up or modelled on the furnace, and their object was 'the aversion 
of ill-will ' (iirl (f)66vov diroTpoTrf/). These little images were 




^1^<|>/o/\' 




Fig. 31. 

also called ^aaKiwta or by the unlearned Trpo^aa-Kavia, charms 
against the evil eye ; and if we may trust the scholiast on Aris- 
tophanes- they formed part of the furniture of most people's 
chimney corners at Athens. Of such ^aaicdvia the Gorgon mask 
was one and perhaps the most common shape. 

In literature the Gorgon first meets us as a Gorgoneion, and 
this Gorgoneion is an underworld bogey. Odysseus^ in Hades 
would fain have held further converse with dead heroes, but 

'Ere that might be, the ghosts thronged round in myriads manifold, 
Weird was the magic din they made, a pale-green fear gat hold 
Of me, lest for my daring Persephone the dread 
From Hades should send up an awful monster's grizzly head.' 

1 Poll. On. VII. 108. - Schol. ad Ar. Nub. 43(5. 

» Od. XI. G33 

e/j.^ 8i x^ijjpbv oios fipa 
p.-q fj.01 yopy€iT}V K€<pa\r)v oeivolo WfXdipov 
i^ 'Aiocos 7r^pL\j/£iey dyairq llepa-ecpdveia.. 
1 have translated yopyd-nv 'grizzly,' not 'Gor^'on,' advisedly. Homer does not 
commit himself to a definite Gorgon. Mr Neil on Aristoph. Kq. 1181 says 
'Vopyo\6(pa means merely "fierce-plumed."' The Gorgon was made out of the 
terror, not the terror out of tlic Gorgon. 



192 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

Homer is quite non-committal as to who and what the awful 
monster is ; all that is clear is that the head only is feared as an 
aTTOTpoTraiov, a bogey to keep you off. Whether he knew of an 
actual monster called a Gorgon is uncertain. The nameless horror 
may be the head of either man or beast, or monster compounded 
of both. 

In this connection it is instructive to note that, though the 
human Medusa-head on the whole obtained, the head of any beast 
is good as a protective charm. Prof. Ridgeway^ has conclusively 
shown that the Gorgoneion on the aegis of Athene is but the head 
of the slain beast whose skin was the raiment of the primitive 
goddess ; the head is worn on the breast, and serves to protect the 
wearer and to frighten his foe; it is a primitive half-magical shield. 
The natural head is later tricked out into an artificial bogey. 

We are familiar with the Gorgoneion on shields, with the 
Gorgoneion on tombs, and as an amulet on vases. On the basis - 



% 




Fig. 32. 

1 J.H.S. XX. 1900, p. xliv. On an askos in the British Museum {Cat. a 80) 
decorated with a stamped relief, a Gorgon's head is figured with horns and animal 
ears. The head stands above, but separated from, a fantastic bodv. 

- Th. Homolle, Bull, de Corr. Hell. xii. 1888, p. 464. 



V] 



The Ker as Gorgon 



193 



in tig. 32 the Gorgoneion is set to guard a statue of which two 
delicate feet remain. On two sides of the triangular statue we 
have the Gorgon head; on the third, serving a like protective 
purpose, a ram's head. The statue, dedicated in the precinct of 
Apollo at Delos, probably represents the god himself, but we need 
seek for no artificial connection between Gorgon, rams and Apollo; 
Gorgoneion and ram alike are merely prophylactic. The basis 
has a further interest in that the inscription^ dates the Gorgon- 
type represented with some precision. The form of the letters 
shows it to have been the work and the dedication of a Naxian 
artist of the early part of the 6th century. 

On a Rhodian plate ^ in the British Museum in fig. 33 the 




Fio. 33. 

^ ft[0]t*ca/)T/o7;s ! ixavidiK( \ ho | Xd/((rtos, see M. Honiolle, oj). cit. 
- J.JI.S. 18H5, PI. Lix. Jirit. Mux. Cat. 



H. 



i;i 



194 Demonology of Ghosts, Sjyrites, Bogeys [ch. 

Gorgoneioii has been furnished with a body tricked out with 
wings, but the mask-head is still dominant. The figure is con- 
ceived in the typical heraldic fashion of the Mistress of Wild 
Things {irorvLa Orjpwv); she is in fact the ugly bogey-, Erinys-side 
of the Great Mother; she is a potent goddess, not as in later days 
a monster to be slain by heroes. The highest divinities of the 
religion of fear and riddance became the harmful bogeys of the cult 
of ' service.' The Olympians in their turn became Christian devils. 

Aeschylus' in instructive fashion places side by side the two 
sets of three sisters, the Gorgons and the Graiae. They are but 
two by-forms of each other. Prometheus foretells to lo her long 
wandering in the bogey land of Nowhere : 

' Pass onward o'er the sounding sea, till thou 
Dost touch Kisthene's dreadful plains, wherein 
The Phorkides do dwell, the ancient maids, 
Three, shaped like swans, having one eye for all. 
One tooth — whom never doth the rising sun 
Glad with his beams, nor yet the moon by night — 
Near them their sisters three, the Gorgons, winged. 
With snakes for hair — hated of mortal man — 
None may behold and bear their breathing blight.' 

The daughters of Phorkys, whom Hesiod'^ calls Grey Ones or 
Old Ones, Graiae, are fair of face though two-thirds blind and 
one-toothed; but the emphasis on the one tooth and the one eye 
shows that in tooth and eye resided their potency, and that in this 
they were own sisters to the Goi'gons. 

The Graiae appear, so far as I know, only once in vase-paintings, 
on the cover of a pyxis in the Central Museum at Athens*, repro- 
duced in fig. 34. They are sea-maidens, as the dolphins show ; 
old Phorkys their father is seated near them, and Poseidon and 
Athene are present in regular Athenian fashion. Hermes has 
brought Perseus, and Perseus waits his chance to get the one 
eye as it is passed from hand to hand. The eye is clearly seen 
in the hand outstretched above Perseus ; one blind sister hands it 
to the other. The third holds in her hand the fanged tooth. The 
vase-painter will not have the Graiae old and loathsome, they are 
lovely maidens ; he remembers that they were white-haired from 
their youth. 

1 Aesch. Prom. Vinct. 793 - Hes. Theog. 270. 

3 Cat. 1956; Ath. Mitt. 1886, Taf. x. 270. 



y] 



The Ker as Gorgon 



195 



The account given by Aeschylus of the Gorgons helps to 
explain their nature : 

'None may behold, and bear their breathing blight V 

They slay by a malign effluence, and this effluence, tradition 
said, came from their eyes. Athenaeus^ quotes Alexander the 




Fig. 34. 

Myndian as his authority for the statement that there actually 
existed creatures who could by their eyes turn men to stone. 

^ Aesch. Prom. Vinct. 800 as dvnrbs ouBeU d<n5uv ?fet trfods. The line is usually 
rendered ' no mortal may behold them and live,' but, in the H'^'lit of the account of 
Athenaeus, it is clear tliat the wfoai arti tlie intolerable exhalations, not tiie breath 
of life. 

- Athen. v. 04 p. 221 KTtlvn rbv vir'' auTTJs deoipr^divra, ov ti^ Trvfu/xari dXXo. tt} yiyfo- 
fjjivri airb ttis rC}v d/xfidruv (pixrebJi (popq. Kai v€Kpbv ttolu. The same account is jjivcn 
by Aelian, Hint. An. vii. 5, and Eustathius § 1704 in communting on ()d. xi. iV.VA. 

13—2 



196 Demonologjj of Ghosts, Sjjrites, Bogeys [ch. 



Some say the beast which the Libyans called Gorgon was like a 
wild sheep, others like a calf; it had a mane hanging over its eyes 
so heavy that it could only shake it aside with difficulty ; it killed 
whomever it looked at, not by its breath but by a destructive exha- 
lation from its eyes. 

What the beast was and how the story arose cannot be decided, 
but it is clear that the Gorgon was regarded as a sort of incarnate 
Evil Eye. The monster was tricked out with cruel tusks and 
snakes, but it slew by the eye, it fascinated. 

The Evil Eye itself is not frequent on monuments ; the 
Gorgoneion as a more complete and more elaborately decorative 
horror attained a wider popularity. But the prophylactic Eye, 
the eye set to stare back the Evil Eye, is common on vases, 
on shields and on the prows of ships (see fig. 37). The curious 
design in fig. 35 is from a Roman mosaic dug up on the Caelian 



tRANUBVS'HlCDEOSl/l 
PR0PITI05ET BASILICT^ 

HIlARlANAEr 




Fig. 35. 

hill\ It served as the pavement in an entrance hall to a Basilica 
built by a certain Hilarius, a dealer in pearls (margaritarius) 
and head of a college of Dendrophoroi, sacred to the Mother of 

^ Visconti, Bull, de Connn. Arch. 1890, Tav. i. and ii. p. 24. A relief with 
similar design exists on the back of a Corinthian marble in the British Museum : its 
apotropaic functions are fully discussed by Prof. Michaelis, J.H.S. vi. 1885, p. 312. 



V] 



The Ker as Siren 197 



the Gods. The inscription prays that ' God may be propitious to 
those who enter here and to tlie Basilica of Hilarius,' and to make 
divine favour more secure, a picture is added to show the complete 
overthrow of the evil eye. Very complete is its destruction. 
Four-footed beasts, birds and reptiles attack it, it is bored through 
with a lance, and as a final prophylactic on the eye-brow is 
perched Athene's little holy owl. Hilarius prayed to a kindly- 
god, but deep down in his heart was the old savage fear\ 

The Gorgon is more monstrous, more savage, than any other of 
the Ker-forms. The Gorgoneion figures little in poetry though 
much in art. It is an underworld bogey but not human enough 
to be a ghost, it lacks wholly the gentle side of the Keres, and 
would scarcely have been discussed here, but that the art-type of 
the Gorgon lent, as will be seen, some of its traits to the Erinys, 
and notably the deathly distillation by which they slay : 

'From out their eyes they ooze a loathly rheuin-.' 



The Ker as Siren =*, 

The Sirens are to the modern mind mermaids, sometimes 
all human, sometimes fish-tailed, evil sometimes, but beautiful 
always. Stilton invokes Sabrina from the waves by 

'...the songs of Sh'ens sweet, 
By dead Parthenope's dear tomb, 
And fair Ligeia's golden comb 
Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks 
Sleeking her soft alluring locks.' 

Homer by the magic of his song lifted them once and for all 
out of the region of mere bogeydom, and yet a careful exami- 

^ For the evil eye in Greece see 0. Jahu, Berichte d. k. sHchs. Ges. d. Wissen- 
schaften, Wien, 1855, and P. Perdrizet, Jiull. de Con: Hell 1000, p. 292, and for 
modern survivals, Tuchniann, Meluninc, 1885. 

- Aesch. Eum. .54 tK 5' 6/j.fji.dTojv Xeijiovai SucrcpiXTJ 5la. Following Dr Verrall, 
I keep the mh. reading. 

^ Since this section was written Dr G. Weicker's treatise ])cr Seeleiirotiel has 
appeared. As the substance of his argument as to the soul-origin of the Sirens had 
been previously published in a dissertation J)e Sireiiibus Quaeatioiws Selectdi- 
(Leipzig, 1805) he had long anticipated my view and I welcome this confirmation 
of a theory at which I liad independently arrived, a theory which indeed must 
occur to everyone who examines tin; art-form of the Sirens. I regret that his work 
was known to me too late for me to utilize the vast stores of evidence he has 
accumulated. 



198 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

nation, especially of their art form, clearly reveals traces of rude 
origin. 

Circe's warning to Odysseus runs thus^ : 

'First to the Sirens shalt thou sail, who all men do beguile. 
Whoso unwitting draws anigh, by magic of their wile, 
They lure him with their singing, nor doth he reach his home 
Nor see his dear wife and his babes, ajoy that he is come. 
For they, the Sirens, lull him with murmur of sweet sound 
Crouching within the meadow : about them is a mound 
Of men that rot in death, their skin wasting the bones around.' 

Odysseus and his comrades, so forewarned, set sail^ : 

'Then straightway sailed the goodly ship and swift the Sirens' isle 
Did reach, for that a friendly gale was blowing all the while. 
Forthwith the gale fell dead, and calm held all the heaving deep 
In stillness, for some god had lulled the billows to their sleep.' 

The song of the Sirens is heard ^: 

'Hither, far-famed Odysseus, come hither, thou the boast 
Of all Achaean men, beach thou thy bark upon our coast, 
And hearken to our singing, for never but did stay 
A hero in his black ship and listened to the lay 
Of our sweet lips; full many a thing he knew and sailed away. 
For we know all things whatsoe'er in Troy's wide land had birth 
And we know all things that shall be upon the fruitful earth.' 

It is strange and beautiful that Homer should make the 
Sirens appeal to the spirit, not to the flesh. To primitive man, 
Greek or Semite, the desire to know — to be as the gods — was 
the fatal desire. 

Homer takes his Sirens as already familiar; he clearly draws 
from popular tradition. There is no word as to their form, no 
hint of parentage : he does not mean them to be mysterious, but 
by a fortunate chance he leaves them shrouded in mystery, the 
mystery of the hidden spell of the sea, with the haze of the 
noontide about them and the meshes of sweet music for their 
unseen toils, — knowing all things, yet for ever unknown. It is 
this mystery of the Sirens that has appealed to modern poetry 
and almost wholly obscured their simple primitive significance. 

' Their words are no more heard aright 
Through lapse of many ages, and no man 
Can any more across the waters wan 
Behold these singing women of the sea.' 

Four points in the story of Homer must be clearly noted. The 
1 Od. XII. 39. ^ Od. XII. 166. ^ Od. xii. 184. 



v] Tlie Ker as Siren 199 

Sirens, though they sing to mariners, are not sea-maidens ; they 
dwell on an island in a flowery meadow. They are mantic 
creatures like the Sphinx with whom they have much in common, 
knowing both the past and the future. Their song takes effect 
at midday, in a windless calm. The end of that song is death. It 
is only from the w^arning of Circe that we know of the heap 
of bones, corrupt in death — horror is kept in the background, 
seduction to the fore. 

It is to art we must turn to know the real nature of the 
Sirens. Ancient art, like ancient literature, knows nothing of the 
fish-tailed mermaid. Uniformly the art-form of the Siren is that 
of the bird-woman. The proportion of bird to woman varies, but 
the bird element is constant. It is interesting to note that, 
though the bird-woman is gradually ousted in modern art by the 
fish-tailed mermaid, the bird element survives in mediaeval times\ 
In the Hortus Deliciannn of the Abbess Herrad (circ. a.d. 1160), 
the Sirens appear as draped women with the clawed feet of birds ; 
with their human hands they are playing on lyres. 

The bird form of the Sirens was a problem even to the 
ancients. Ovid^ asks : 

' Whence came these feathers and these feet of birds ? 
Your faces are the faces of fair maids.' 

Ovid's aetiology is of course beside the mark. The answer to his 
pertinent question is quite simple. The Sirens belong to the same 
order of bogey beings as the Sphinx and the Harpy ; the monstrous 
form expresses the monstrous nature ; they are birds of prey but 
with power to lure by their song. In the Harpy-form the ravening 
snatching nature is emphasized and developed, in the Sphinx the 
mantic power of all uncanny beings, in the Siren the seduction of 
song. The Sphinx, though mainly a prophetess, keeps Harpy 
elements ; she snatches away the youths of Thebes : she is but 

1 Mediaeval Sirens are more fully discussed in my Myths of the Odyssey, p. 17'2, 
- Met. V. 552 

vobis Acbeloides unde 
pluma pedesque avium, cum virginis ora geratis? 

Apollonius Rhodius also believes that the bird form was a metamorphosis. Argon. 
IV. 8'JB 

rbrt 5' 6,\\o niv omvoIctlv 
&\\o oi irafjdfHKT)^ ivaXi-yKiai HaKov ibiaOai. 



200 DemonoJogy of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

'a man-seizing Ker^' The Siren too, though mainly a seductive 
singer, is at heart a Harpy, a bird of prey. 

This comes out very clearly in representations on vase-paintings. 
A black-figured ary hallos " of Corinthian style (fig. 36), now in the 
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, is our earliest artistic source for the 




Fig. 30. 

Siren myth. Odysseus, bound to the mast, has come close up to 
the island : on the island are perched ' Sirens twain.' Above the 
ship hover two great black birds of prey in act to pounce on the 
mariners. These birds cannot be merely decorative : they in a 
sense duplicate the Sirens. The vase-painter knows the Sirens 
are singing demons sitting on an island ; the text of Homer was 
not in his hands to examine the account word by word, but 
the Homeric story haunts his memory. He knows too that in 
popular belief the Sirens are demons of prey ; hence the great 
birds. To the right of the Sirens on the island crouches a third 
figure ; she is all human, not a third Siren. She probably, indeed 
all but certainly, represents the mother of the Sirens, Chthon, the 
Earth. Euripides^ makes his Helen in her anguish call on the 

'Winged maidens, virgins, daughters of the Earth, 
The Sirens,' 

to join their sorrowful song to hers. The parentage is significant. 
The Sirens are not of the sea, not even of the land, but demons of 
the underworld ; they are in fact a by-form of Keres, souls. 

The notion of the soul as a human-faced bird is familiar in 
Egyptian, but rare in Greek, art. The only certain instance is, 

1 Aescb. Sept. 776. The nature of the Sphinx as a mantle earth-demou will be 
discussed in detail later (p. 207). 

- PubUshed and discussed by H. Bulla, Strena Helhigiana, p. 31. Eecently 
acquired for the Boston Museum, see Twenty-sixth Annual Report of Boston Museum 
of Fine Arts, Dec. 31, 1901, p. 35. 

3 Eur. Hel. 167. 



v] The Ker as Siren 201 

so far as I know, the vase in the British Museum^ on which is 
represented the death of Procris. Above Procris falling in death 
hovers a winged bird- woman. She is clearly, I think, the soul of 
Procris. To conceive of the soul as a bird escaping from the mouth 
is a fancy so natural and beautiful that it has arisen among man)'- 
peoples. In Celtic mythology^ Maildun, the Irish Odysseus, comes 
to an island with trees on it in clusters on which were perched 
many birds. The aged man of the island tells him, ' These are the 
souls of my children and of all my descendants, both men and 
women, who are sent to this little island to abide with me ac- 
cording as they die in Erin.' Sailors to this day believe that 
sea-mews are the souls of their drowned comrades. Antoninus 
Liberalis'' tells how, when Ktesulla because of her father's broken 
oath died in child-bed, ' they carried her body out to be buried, 
and from the bier a dove flew forth and the body of Ktesulla 
disappeared.' 

The persistent anthropomorphism of the Greeks stripped the 
bird-soul of all but its wings. The human winged eidolon 
prevailed in art : the bird -woman became a death-demon, a soul 
sent to fetch a soul, a Ker that lures a soul, a Siren. 

Later in date and somewhat different in conception is the 
scene on a red-figured stamnos in the British Museum* (fig. 37). 
The artist's desire for a balanced design has made him draw two 
islands, on each of which a Siren is perched. Over the head of 
one is inscribed 'I/j,e(p)o'7ra ' lovely-voiced.' A third Siren flies or 
rather falls headlong down on to the ship. The drawing of the 
eye of this third Siren should be noted. The eye is indicated by 
two strokes only, without the pupil. This is the regular method 
of representing the sightless eye, i.e. the eye in death or sleep or 
blindness. Tlie third Siren is dying ; she has hurled herself from 
the rock in despair at the fortitude of Odysseus. This is clearly 

1 Cat. E 477. The vase is a Iwlehe of late style with columnar handles. In 
previously discussing this design (Mi/tlis of tlie oji/xsfi/, p. 15H, pi. 40 and Miith. 
and Mon. Ancii'iit AtlD'iia, p. Ixix, fig. 14) I felt uncertain whether the bird- woman 
were Harpy, Siren, or Soul. I am now convinced that a soul is intended, and 
that the bird form was probably borrowed from Egypt: see Book of the Dead, 
Vignette xci. 

- See Mi/tlix of tlie Odijsxei/, p. 180. 

•* Anton. Lib. i. I owe this reference to Prof. Sam. Wide, A. Mitt. xxvi. 11)01, 
2, p. 15.5. At the miracle plays it was a custom to let a bird Hy when a person 
died — a crow for the impenitent thief and a white dove for the penitent one. See 
Mr Hugh Stewart, Hoethius, p. 187. 

■* II. M. Cat. E 440. Monimenti delV Imt. vol. i. pi. 8. 



202 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

what the artist wishes to say, but he may have been haunted by 
an artistic tradition of the pouncing bird of prey. He also has 
adopted the number three, which by his time was canonical for 
the Sirens. By making the third Siren fly headlong between the 
two others he has neatly turned a difficulty in composition. On 




Fig. 37. 

the reverse of this vase are three Love-gods, who fall to be dis- 
cussed later (Chap. Xli.). Connections between the subject matter 
of the obverse and reverse of vases are somewhat precarious, but it 
is likely, as the three Love-gods are flying over the sea, that the vase- 
painter intended to emphasize the seduction of love in his Sirens. 



The clearest light on the lower nature of the Sirens is thrown 
by the design in fig. 38 from a Hellenistic reliefs The monu- 
ment is of course a late one, later by at least two centuries than 
the vase-paintings, but it reflects a primitive stage of thought 
and one moreover wholly free from the influence of Homer. The 
scene is a rural one. In the right-hand corner is a herm, in 
front of it an altar, near at hand a tree on which hangs a votive 

1 Published by Scbreiber, Hellenititische Reliefbilder, Taf. lxi. : where the relief 
is now is not known. Fully discussed by Dr Otto Crusius, ' Die Epiphanie der 
Sirene,' Philologos (N.F. iv.j, p. 93. Dr Crusius rightly observes that the relief 
has been misunderstood. It represents rather an ^(podoi than a <Tvfj.ir\€yfxa., and the 
recumbent figure is a mortal man not a Silen. 



V] 



The Ker as Siren 



203 




Fig. 38. 



syrinx. Some peasant or possibly a wayfarer has fallen asleep. 

Down upon him has pounced 

a winged and bird-footed 

woman. It is the very image 

of obsession, of nightmare, of 

a haunting midday dream. 

The woman can be none other 

than an evil Siren. Had the 

scene been represented by an 

earlier artist, he would have 

made her ugly because evil ; 

but by Hellenistic times the 

Sirens were beautiful women, 

all human but for wings and 

sometimes bird-feet. 

The terrors of the midday 
sleep were well known to the Greeks in their sun-smitten land ; 
nightmare to them was also daymare. Such a visitation, coupled 
possibly with occasional cases of sunstroke, was of course the 
obsession of a demon \ Even a troubled tormenting illicit dream 
was the work of a Siren. In sleep the will and the reason are 
becalmed and the passions unchained. That the midday night- 
mare went to the making of the Siren is clear from the windless 
calm and the heat of the sun in Homer. The horrid end, the 
wasting death, the sterile enchantment, the loss of wife and 
babes, all look the same way. Homer, with perhaps some blend 
of the Northern mermaid in his mind, sets his Sirens by the sea, 
thereby cleansing their uncleanness ; but later tradition kept 
certain horrid primitive elements when it made of the Siren a 
hetaira disallowing the lawful gifts of Aphrodite. 

There remains another aspect of the Sirens. They appear 
frequently as monuments, sometimes as actual mourners, on tombs. 
Here all the erotic element has disappeared; they are substantially 

' Pliny cites Dinon as authority for a like superstition in India. Nut. Hint. x. 
40 (F.II.O. 11. p. !tO) : Nee Sirenes iinpetraverunt fidem adtirmet licet Dinon Clitarclii 
celebrati auctoris pater in India esse rnulcerique earuni cantu (juoh Ki'ivatos sonino 
lacerent. And cf. Aclian II. A. xviii. 22, 2H. Siren in the Septua^'int is the word 
used of the desert bogey that our translation renders 'dragon,' Job xxx. 30 'I am 
brother to the dragon and companion to owls,' and again Mic-ah i. H ' I will make 
a wailing like the dragon and a mourning as the owls' ; but the rendering Siren is 
probably due to a confusion between the plurals of l^l* jackal and ]^3ri sea-monster. 



204 Demonologii of Ghosts, Sjyrites, Bogeys [ch. 

Death-Keres, Harpies, though to begin with they imaged the soul 
itself. The bird-woman of the Harpy tomb, the gentle angel of 
death, has been already noted (p. 177). The Siren on a black-figured 
lekythos in the British Museum^ (fig. 39) is purely monumental. 




Fig. 39. 

She stands on the grave stele playing her great lyre, while two 
bearded men with their dogs seem to listen intent. She is grave 
and beautiful with no touch of seduction. Probably at first the 
Siren was placed on tombs as a sort of charm, a Trpoj^aaKaviov, a 
soul to keep off souls. It has already been shown, in dealing with 
apotropaic ritual (p. 196), that the charm itself is used as counter- 
charm. So the dreaded Death-Ker is set itself to guard the 
tomb. Other associations would gather round. The Siren was 
a singer, she would chant the funeral dirge ; this dirge might be 
the praises of the dead. The epitaph that Erinna'^ wrote for her 
girl-friend Baukis begins 

' Pillars and Sirens mine and mournful urn.' 

On later funeral monuments Sirens appear for the most part 
as mourners, tearing their hair and lamenting. Their apotropaic 
function was wholly forgotten. Where an apotropaic monster is 
wanted we find an owl or a sphinx. 

Even on funeral monuments the notion of the Siren as either 
soul or Death-Angel is more and more obscured by her potency as 
sweet singer. Once, however, when she appears in philosoj^hy, 
there is at least a haunting remembrance that she is a soul who 

1 B.M. Cat. B 651. J. E. Harrison, Myths of the Odyssey, PI. 39. 

2 Erinna, frg. 5 ZraXai koI Sft/o^fes ifial kuI Trivdifie Kpuxrcre. 



v] The Ker as Siren 205 

sings to souls. In the cosmography Avith which he ends the 
Republic, Plato ^ thus writes : ' The spindle turns on the knees of 
Ananke, and on the upper surface of each sphere is perched 
a Siren, who goes round with them hymning a single tone. 
The eight together form one Harmony.' Commentators explain 
that the Sirens are chosen because they are sweet singers, but 
then, if music be all, wdiy is it the evil Sirens and not the good 
Muses who chant the music of the spheres? Plutai-ch- felt the 
difficulty. In his Symposiacs he makes one of the guests say : 
' Plato is absurd in committing the eternal and divine revolutions 
not to the Muses but to the Sirens ; demons who are by no 
means either benevolent or in themselves good.' Another guest, 
Ammonius, attempts to justify the choice of the Sirens by giving 
to them in Homer a mystical significance. ' Even Homer,' he says, 
' means by their music not a power dangerous and destructive to 
man, but rather a power that inspires in the souls that go from 
Hence Thither, and wander about after death, a love for things 
heavenly and divine and a forgetfulness of things mortal, and 
thereby holds them enchanted by singing. Even here/ he goes on 
to say, ' a dim murmur of that music reaches us, rousing remi- 
niscence.' 

It is not to be for a moment supposed that Homer's Sirens had 
really any such mystical content. But, given that they have the 
bird-form of souls, that they ' know all things,' are sweet singers 
and dwellers in Hades, and they lie ready to the hand of the 
mystic. Proclus^ in his commentary on the Republic says, witli 
perhaps more truth than he is conscious of, ' the Sirens are a kind 
of souls living the life of the spirit.' His interpretation is not 
merely fanciful; it is a blend of primitive tradition with mystical 
philosophy. 

The Sirens are further helped to their high station on the 

spheres by the Orphic belief that purified souls went to the stars, 

nay even became stars. In the Peace of Aristophanes* the servant 

asks Trygaeus, 

'It is true then, what they say, that in the air 
A man becomes a stai', when he comes to die?' 

' Plat. Hep. 617 u. - Plut. Sijmp. ix. 14. G. 

' Procl. ad Plat. Rep. loc. cit. i/'uxot rtj/es voepcDs fwffat. 

•• Ar. Pax, 832. For this Orphic doctrine see Kolule, I'sijche, ii. p. \'ii*, 
Dieterich, Nelcuia, pp. 104 U. 



206 Demonology of Ghosts, Sp7'ites, Bogeys [ch. 

To the poet the soul is a bird in its longing to be free : 

' Could I take me to some cavern for mine hiding, 
On the hill-tops, where the sun scarce hath trod, 
Or a cloud make the place of mine abiding. 
As a bird among the bird-droves of God^.' 

And that upward flight to heavenly places is as the flying of 
a Siren : 

' With golden wings begirt my body flies, 

Sirens have lent me their swift winged feet. 
Upborne to uttermost ether I shall meet 
And mix with heavenly Zeus beyond the skies 2.' 

But, though Plato and the poets and the mystics exalt the 
Siren, ' half-angel and half-bird,' to cosmic functions, yet, to the 
popular mind, they are mainly things, if not wholly evil, yet 
fearful and to be shunned. This is seen in the myth of their 
contest with the Muses^. Here the}' are the spirits of forbidden 
intoxication ; as such on vases they join the motley crew of 
Centaurs and Satyrs who revel with Dionysos. They stand, it 
would seem, to the ancient as to the modern, for the impulses in 
life as yet unmoralized, imperious longings, ecstasies, whether of 
love or art or philosophy, magical voices calling to a man from his 
* Land of Heart's Desire ' and to which if he hearken it may be he 
will return home no more — voices too, which, whether a man sail 
by or stay to hearken, still sing on. 

The Siren bird-woman transformed for ever by the genius of 
Homer into the sweet-voiced demon of seduction may seem re- 
mote from the Ker of which she is but a specialized form. A 
curious design* on a black-figured cylix in the Louvre (fig. 40) 
shows how close was the real connection. The scene is a banquet : 
five men are reclining on couches, two of them separated by a 
huge deinos, a wine-vessel, from which a boy has drawn wine in an 
oinochoe. Over two of the men are hovering winged figures, each 
holding a crown and a spray ; over two others hover bird-women, 
each also holding a crown and a spray. What are we to call these 
ministrant figures, what would the vase-painter himself have called 
them ? Are the human winged figures Love-gods, are the bird- 
women Sirens ? For lack of context it is hard to say with certainty. 

1 Eur. Hipp. 732. - Eur. frg. 911. ^ Mtjths of the Odyssey, p. 166. 

« Bull, de Con: Hell. 1898, p. 238, fig. 6. 



V] 



The Ker as Sphinx 



207 



Thus much is clear, both kinds of figures are favouring genii 
of the feast, and for our purpose this is all-important : the bird- 
women, be they Sirens or not, and the winged human figures, be 
they Love-gods or merely 'Kera^, perform the same function. The 




Fig. 40. 



development of the Love-god, Eros, from the Ker will be discussed 
later (Chap, xii.) ; for the present it is best to regard these bird- 
women and winged sprites as both of the order of Keres, as yet 
unspecialized in function. 



The Ker as Sphinx. 

Two special features characterize the Sphinx: she was a Harpy 
carrying off men to destruction, an incarnate plague ; she was the 
soothsayer with the e\dl habit of asking riddles as well as answering 
them. Both functions, though seemingly alien, were characteristic 
of underworld bogeys ; the myth-making mind i)ut them together 
and wove out of the two the tale of the unanswered riddle and the 
consequent deathly pest. 

On the vase-painting in fig. 41 from a cylix* in the Museo 
Gregoriano of the Vatican, we have a charming representation 
of the riddle-answering Oedipus, whose name is written Oidipodes, 

1 Mus. Greg. No. 186. Hartwig, Meisterschaleit, Taf. lxxiii. 



208 DemoHology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

sitting meditating in front of the oracle. The Sphinx on her 
column is half monument, half personality ; she is a very human 
monster, she has her lion-body, but she is a lovely attentive 
maiden. From her lips come the letters Kav rpi, which may mean 
and three or and three (-footed). In the field is a delicate 
decorative spray, which, occurring as it does on vases with a 
certain individuality of drawing, seems to be, as it were, the 
signature of a particular master \ 




Fig. 41. 

The Sphinx in fig. 41 is all oracular, but occasionally, on vases 
of the same date, she appears in her other function as the ' man- 
snatching Ker.' She leaves her pedestal and carries off a Theban 
youth. The 5th century vase-painter with his determined euphe- 
mism, even when he depicts her carrying off her prey, makes her 
do it with a certain Attic gentleness, more like a death-Siren than 

1 Dr Hartwig, op. cit, has collected and discussed these vases and gives to the 
artist the name ' Meister mit dem Ranke.' 



V] 



The Ker as Sphinx 



•209 



a Harpy. Aeschylus^ in the Seven against Thebes describes her as 
the monster she is ; the Sphinx on the shield of Parthenopaeus is a 
horrid bogey, the 'reproach of the state/ 'eater of raw-flesh,' with 
hungry jaws, bringing ill-hick to him who bears her on his ensign. 
In the curious vase-painting in fig. 42, a design from a late 
Lower Italy krater^ in the museum at Naples, the Sphinx is wholly 




Fig. 42. 

oracular, and this time she must answer the riddle, not ask it. 
The Sphinx is seated on a rocky mound, near which stands erect 
a snake. The snake is not, I think, Avithout meaning; it is the 
oracular beast of the earth-oracle. The Silenus who has come to 
consult the oracle holds in his hand a bird. The scene would be 
hopelessly enigmatic but for one of the fables that are current 
under the name of Aesop^ which precisely describes the situation. 
' A certain bad man made an agreement with some one to prove 
that the Delphic oracle was false, and when the appointed day 
came, he took a sparrow in his hand and covered it with his 
garment and came to the sanctuary, and standing hi front of the 
oracle, asked whether the thing in his hand was alive or dead, and 

> Aesch. Sept. c. Theh. .539. 

^ Heydemann, Cat. No. 2840. Min^eo Borhonico xii. 9. Discussed and explained 
by Dr Otto Crusius, Festuchrift fur Overbecic, p. 102. Dr Crusins holds that the 
snake is merely a ' Fiillfigur.' 

•' Aesop. Fab. 55. 

H. II 



210 Demonology of Ghosts, S2)rites, Bogeys [ch. 

he meant if the oracle said it was dead, to show the sparrow alive, 
but if the oracle said it was alive, to strangle it first and then 
show it. But the god knew his wicked plan, and said to him, 
" Have done, for it depends on you whether what you hold is dead 
or living." The story shows plainly that the divinity is not lightly 
to be tempted.' 

The story, taken in conjunction with the vase-painting it 
explains, shows clearly another thing. The Sphinx was mainly 
a local Theban bogey, but she became the symbol of oracular 
divinity. At Delphi there was an earth-oracle guarded by a 
snake, and in honour of that earth-oracle the Naxians upreai'ed 
their colossal Sphinx ^ and set it in the precinct of Gaia. As time 
went on, the savage ' man-snatching ' aspect of the Sphinx faded, 
remembered only in the local legend, while her oracular aspect 
grew ; but the local legend is here as always the more instructive. 

The next representation of the Sphinx (fig. 43), from the frag- 
ment of an oinochoe in the 
Berlin Museum"'', is specially 
suggestive. The monster is 
inscribed, not with the name 
we know her by, ' Sphinx,' 
but as ' Kassmia,' the Kad- 
mean One, the bogey of 
Kadmos. Thebearded mon- 
ster with wings and claws 
and dog-like head has lost 
her orthodox lion-body, and 
lent it perhaps to Oedipus 
who stands in front of her. 
The scene is of course pure 
comedy, and shows how 
near to the Greek mind 

were the horrible and the grotesque, the thing feared and the 
thing scoffed at. The Kassmia, the bogey of Kadmos, may have 
brought her lion-body with Kadmos from the East, but the suj)- 
position, though very possible, is not necessary. Cithaeron was 




Fig. 43. 



1 Discovered in the excavations at Delphi, see HomoUe, Fouilles de Delphes, 1902, 
T. II. pi. XIV. 

' Berlin, Inv. 3186. Jahrbuch d. Inst. 1891, Anzeiger, p. 119, fig. 17. 



V] 



The Ker as Sphinx 



211 



traditionally lion-haunted ^ The Sphinx may have borrowed some 
of her traits and part of her body from a real lion haunting a real 
local tomb. 

It is worth noting in this connection that Hesiod^ calls the 
monster not Sphinx but Phix : 

'By stress of Orthios, she, Echidna, bare 
Disastrous Phix, a bane to Kadmos' folk.' 

The scholiast remarks that ' Mount Phikion where she dwelt 
was called after her,' but the reverse is probably true. Phix was 
the local bogey of Phikion. The rocky mountain which rises to 
the S.-E. corner of Lake Copais is still locally known as Phaga^ 
By a slight and easy modification Phix became Sphix or Sphinx, 
the ' throttler,' an excellent name for a destructive bogey. 

The last representation of the Sphinx, in fig. 44, brings us to 
her characteristic as tomb-haunter. The design is from a krater^ 




Fig. 44. 

in the Vagnonville Collection of the Museo Greco Etrusco at 
Florence. The Sphinx is seated on a tomb-mound (%wyLta 7?}9) 
of the regular sepulchral type. That the mound is sepulchral 
is certain from the artificial stone basis pierced with holes'^ on 
which it stands. Two lawless Satyrs attack the mound with 



1 P. I. 41. 4. 

2 Hes. Theoi). .326 and Scut. Her. 33, and see Plat. Crat. 411 \>. 
» Dr Frazer ad P. ix. 20. 2. 

* Miliini, Mmi'o Tojwfirajico, j). O'.). ' Delphika,' .f.lI.S. IH'.tl), p. 23"). 
'' Tlie purpose of tlicw; holcH, which occur frequently in representations of tomb- 
mounds ou Athenian lekytlioi, in not, ho far an 1 know, made out. 

14—2 



212 Demonology of Ghosts, Sjjrites, Bogeys [ch. 

picks. The Sphinx is a tomb-haunting bogey, a Ker, but ulti- 
mately she fades into a decorative tomb monument, with always 
perhaps some prophylactic intent. In this, as in her mantic 
aspect, she is own cousin to the Ker-Siren, but with the Sphinx 
the mantic side predominates. The Sphinx, unlike the Siren, 
never developed into a trinity, though when she became decorative 
she is doubled for heraldic purposes. 

It is time to resume the various shifting notions that cluster 
round the term Ker, perhaps the most untranslateable of all 
Greek words. Ghost, bacillus, disease, death-angel, death-fate, fate, 
bogey, magician have all gone to the making of it. So shifting 
and various is the notion that it is hard to say what is primary, 
what developed, but deep down in the lowest stratum lie the two 
kindred conceptions of ghost and bacillus. It is only by a severe 
effort of the imagination that we can think ourselves back into an 
adequate mental confusion to realize all the connotations of Ker. 

When the lexicographers came to define the word they had 
no easy task. Their struggles — they are honest men, if not too 
intelligent — are mstructive. Happily they make no attempt at 
real formulation, but jot things down as they come. Hesychius, 
after his preliminary statement 'Krjp (neuter, with circumflex accent) 
the soul, (oxytone, feminine) death-bringing fate, death,' gives us 
suggestive particulars : Kripa<i ' aKaOapaLa^, ixoXvafxara, fi\d^a<i, 
where we see the unclean bacilli; Kr^pov' Xeirrov voarjpop, which 
reminds us of the evil skinny Ker of the vase-painting (fig. 16) ; 
KTjpiovo-dat.' iK7r\y']TTecrdai, where the bogey Ker is manifest; 
KTjpKodi^vaf virb ctkotoSlvov XTjcpOfjvai, where the whirlwind seems 
indicated, though it may be the dizziness of death. Kerukainae 
were the female correlatives of Kerykes, ' women whose business 
it was to collect things polluted ' and carry them off to the sea^ 
Most curious and primitive of all, we are told- that KypuKe^; itself 
means not only messengers, ministers, a priestly race descended 
from Hermes, but ' they call the insects that impregnate the wild 
fig K7]pvKa<i.' Here are bacilli indeed, but for life not for death. 



^ Siiidas S.V. Kal K-qpvKaiva? e/cdXoi'j' W.'Ke^avdpeis yvvaiKUS, a'irives els ras avXas 
TraoLOvcraL /cat rds ffwoiKias €(p' diTf crvvayeipdv to. ixidafiara Kal a.iro(f>ip€i.v eh daXaaaav 
airep (koXovv <pv\dKta. 

- Hesych. s.v. Kal toi)s ipivd^ovTas tovs epivovs Kr/pvKas Xeyovcri. 



y] The Ker as Ertnys 21 



o 



The Ker as Erinys. 

It has been already indicated that a Ker is sometimes an 
avenger, but this aspect of the word has been advisedly reserved 
because it takes us straight to the idea of the Erinys. 

Pausanias\ a propos of the grave of Koroibos at Megara, tells 
us a story in which a Ker figures plainly as an Erinys, with a touch 
of the Sphinx and of the death-Siren. Psamathe, daughter of 
Krotopos, King of Argos, had a child by Apollo, which, fearing 
her father's anger, she exposed. The child was found and killed 
by the sheep-dogs of Krotopos. Apollo sent Poine (Penalty or 
Vengeance) on the city of the Argives. Poine, they say, snatched 
children from their mothers until Koroibos, to please the Argives, 
slew her. After he had slain her, there came a second pestilence 
upon them and lasted on. Koroibos had to go to Delphi to expiate 
his sin ; he was ordered to build a temple of Apollo wherever the 
tripod he brought from Delphi should fall. He built of course the 
town of Tripodisci. The grave of Koroibos at Megara was sur- 
mounted by the most ancient Greek stone images Pausanias 
had ever seen, a figure of Koroibos slaying Poine. There were 
elegiac verses carved on it recounting the tale of Psamathe and 
Koroibos. Now Pausanias mentions no Ker, onl}^ Poine ; but the 
Anthologists- have preserved for us verses which, if not actually 
those carved on the grave, at all events refer to it, and in them 
occur the notable words : 

' I am the Ker, sLiin by Koi'oibos, I dwell on hi« tomb. 
Here at my feet, on account of the tripod, he lies for his doom.' 

Poine is clearly the avenging ghost of the child of Psamathe 
causing a pest which snatched babes from their mothers, and Poine 
the ghost-pest is a Ker and practically a Ker-Erinys. 

The simple truth emerges so clearly as to be almost self- 
evident, yet is constantly ignored, that primarily the Keres-Erinyes 
are just what the words say, the ' Keres Angry-ones.' There is no 
reason to doubt the truth of what Pausanias-' tells us, that the 

1 1'. I. 4:^. 7. 

•■^ Anthol. I'd I. VII. 154 

Yilfj-l 5e Krip Tv/xjiovxoi, 6 oi KTcivai /jlc K6/jot/3oj 
Kelrai 5' w5' vtt' e/xots irocrirl Sia TpLiroda. 
* P. VIII. 25. 4 oTi Ti^ Ov/xi^ XPV'^^"-'- KaXoua-iv ipivvnv oi '.\/3\-d5fy. 



214 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [en. 

Arcadians and, with the Arcadians, probably the rest of the primi- 
tive Greeks, called * being in a rage' ipivveiv. Demeter at Thelpusa 
had two surnames and even two statues. When she was wroth 
they called her Erinys^ on account of her wrath, when she relented 
and bathed they called her Lousia. Pausanias gives as literary 
authority for the surname Erinys, Antimachus who wrote (4th 
cent. B.C.) of the expedition of the Argives against Thebes. 

The Erinyes, on this showing, are one form of the countless host 
of divine beings whose names are simply adjectival epithets, not 
names proper. Such others are the Eumenides the Kindly Ones, 
the Potniae the Awful Ones, the JVIaniae the Madnesses, the 
Praxidikae the Vengeful Ones. With a certain delicate shyness, 
founded possibly on a very practical fear, primitive man will not 
address his gods by a personal name ; he decently shrouds them 
in class epithets. There are people living now, Celts for the most 
part, who shrink from the personal attack of a proper name, and 
call their friends, in true primitive fashion, the Old One, the Kind 
One, the Blackest One, and the like. 

It is apparent that, given these adjectival names, the gods are 
as many as the moods of the worshipper, i.e. as his thoughts about 
bis gods. If he is kind, they are Kindly Ones ; when he feels venge- 
ful, they are Vengeful Ones. 

The question arises, why did the angry aspect of the Keres, 
i.e. the Erinyes, attain to a development so paramount, so self- 
sufficing, that already in Homer they are distinct from the Keres, 
with functions, if not forms, clearly defined, beyond possibility of 
confusion. It is precisely these functions that have defined them. 
A Ker, as has been seen, is for good and for evil, is active for 
plants, for animals, as for men : a Ker when angry is Erinys : a Ker 
is never so angry as when he has been killed. The idea of Erinys 
as distinct from Ker is developed out of a human relation intensely 
felt. The Erinys primai'ily is the Ker of a human being un- 
righteously slain. Erinys is not death ; it is the outraged soul 
of the dead man crying for vengeance ; it is the Ker as Poine. 
In discussing the Keres it has been abundantly shown that ghost 

1 The explanation of Erinyes as 'angry ones' is confirmed by modern philology. 
F. Froehde, Bezzenherger. Beitrfige, xx. p. 188, derives the word Erinys from 
i-pva-vos, Lith. runtas, angry. 



v] The Ker as Erinys 215 

is a word too narrow : Keres denote a wider animism. With 

Erinys the case is otherwise: the Erinyes are primarily human 

ghosts, but all human ghosts are not Erinyes, only those ghosts 

that are angry, and that for a special reason, usually because they 

have been murdered. Other cases of angrv ghosts are covered 

by the black Ker. It is the vengeful inhumanity of the Erinyes, 

arising as it does from their humanity, which marks them out 

from the Keres. 

That the Erinyes are primarily the vengeful souls of murdered 

men can and will in the sequel be plainly shown, but it would be idle 

to deny that already in Homer they have passed out of this stage 

and are personified almost beyond recognition. They are no longer 

souls ; they are the avengers of souls. Thus in Homer, in the 

prayer of Althaea, Erim's\ though summoned to avenge the 

death of Althaea's brethren, is clearly not the ghost of either of 

them ; she is one, they are two ; she is female, they are male. 

Althaea prays : 

' Aud her the Erinys blood-haunting "■^ 
Hearil out of Erebos' depths, she of the soul without pity.' 

There is nothing that so speedily blurs aud effaces the real 
origin of things as this insistent Greek habit of impersonation. 
We were able to track the Keres back to something like their 
origin just because they never really got personified. In this 
respect poets are the worst of mythological offenders. By their 
intense realization they lose all touch with the confusions of 
actuality. The Erinyes summoned by Althaea were really ghosts 
of the murdered brothers, but Homer separates them off into 
avengers. 

^ II. IX. .571 Tri% 5' 7]epo<po2TLi 'Epivvs 

^/cXi'ei/ £^ 'Ep^^efffpiv d/j-dXixov rjTop ^x^^'^"-- 

• On the epithet -qepocpoiTti 'blood-haunting,' usually translated 'walking in dark- 
ness,' Roscher {Mijth. Lex. s.v.) has based a whole mistaken theory of tbe nature of 
the Erinyes as 'storm-clouds.' The Townley scbolion (nd loc.) offers an alternative 
reading of the epithet more consonant with the nature of the Erinys : ol 5i empoTrwrts, 
i'/Knp.ivov ToO elap owep iarl Kara ^aXa/jLiviovs alfxa. On this showing the Erinyes 
would be not those who ' walked in darkness ' but those who sucked the blood, a 
view certainly consonant with the picture of the Erinyes presented by Aescliylns: 
and ^QvTOi pocpdv (pvdpbv (k fMc\^o}v iri\auov (Earn. '2()4). The termination -Trwrts 
instead of -ipoiTis gives of course a simple and satisfactory meaning; but, acci'i)ting 
■ijfpo- as representing the Cyprian form dap 'blood,' it is j)erhai)s possible to ntain 
■(potTis and explain tlie ejiithct as 'blood-haunting.' Another alternative is suggcHted 
by Fick, i.e. that the primitive form is qapo-iroiTii ' blutrachend,' Troms being akin 
to TTOivf), cf. Apollo PoitioH (see A. Fick, 'Gotternamen,' in Uezzcnberger. BeitriUje, 
XX. ).. 170). 



216 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

In other Homeric Erinyes there is often not even a fond of 
possible ghosts. Phoenix transgresses against his father Amyntor^ 
and Amyntor for his unnatural offence invokes against him the 
' hateful Erinyes ' : they are no ancestral ghosts, they are merelj^ 
avengers of the moral law, vaguer equivalents of ' Underworld 
Zeus and dread Persephone.' Ares^ ofifends his mother Aphrodite, 
who is certainly not dead and has no ghost, and the wounds 
inflicted on him by Athene appease the ' Erinys of his mother.' 
In a word, in Homer, as has frequently been pointed out, the 
Erinyes are avengers of offences against blood-relations on the 
mother's and father's side, of all offences against moral, and finally 
even natural law. 

The familiar case of Xanthus, the horse of Achilles^, marks the 
furthest pole of complete abstraction. Xanthus warns Achilles 
that, for all their fleetness, his horses bear him to his death, and 

'When he thus had spoken 
The Erinyes stayed his voice.' 

The intervention of the Erinj-es here is usually explained by a 
reference to the saying of Heracleitus^ that ' the sun could not go 
out of his course without the Erinyes, ministers of justice, finding 
him out.' I doubt if the philosophy of Heracleitus supplies the true 
explanation. The horse speaks as the mouthpiece of the fates, the 
Erinyes ; they tell of what fate (/jLoipa) will accomplish ; nay more, 
as fates they, reluctant but obedient, carry him to his death. 
When Xanthus has uttered the mandate of fate, the Fates close 
his mouth, not because he transgresses their law, but because he 
has uttered it to the full. 

Be that as it may, the view stated by Heracleitus is of capital 
importance. It shows that to a philosopher writing at the end of 
the 6th century B.C. the Erinyes were embodiments of law, ministers 
of Justice. Of course a philosopher is as little to be taken as 
reflecting popular faith as a poet, indeed far less ; but even a 
philosopher cannot, save on pain of becoming unintelligible, use 
words apart from popular associations. Hei'acleitus was indeed 
drunk with the thought of law, of Fate, of unchanging ' moral 

1 II. IX. 454. - n. XXI. 412. 

^ II. XIX. 418 Cjs apa. (pwv^cravTOS epivves iax^dov avbrju. 

■* Plut. de Ex. 11 rfKi.os yap ovx virep^rjcnrai /xerpa ((pijaiv 6 'HpanXeiTos) el 5e fj.ri 
'Epivvijes /JLiv, AiKTjs iw'iKovpoi, e^evp-qcrovaiv. 



t] The Erini/es of AescJnjhts 217 

retribution,' with the eternal sequence of his endless flux ; his 
Erinyes are cosmic beyond the imaguiation of Homer, but still the 
fact remains that he uses them as embodiments of the vengeance 
that attends transgression. By his time they are not Keres, not 
souls, still less bacilli, not even avengers of tribal blood, but in the 
widest sense ministers of Justice^ (Ai/c?;? iTrUovpoi). 



The Erinyes of Aeschylus. 

Heracleitus has pushed abstraction to its highest pitch. When 
we come to Aeschylus we find, as would be expected, a conception 
of the Erinyes that is at once narrower and more vitalized, more 
objective, more primitive. In the Septem "^ the conception is 
narrower, more primitive than in Homer ; the Erinys is in fact 
an angry ghost. This is stated with the utmost precision. 

' Alas, thou Fate — grievous, dire to be borne, 
And Oedipu.-i' holy Shade, 
Black Erinys, verily, mighty art thou,' 

chant the chorus again and again. Fate is close at hand and 
nigh akin, but the real identity and apposition is between the 
shade, the ghost of Oedipus, and the black Erinys. 

Here and in the Prometheus Bound ^ Aeschylus is fully 
conscious that it is the actual ghost, not a mere abstract venge- 
ance that haunts and pursues. lo is stung by the oestrus^ 
because she is a cow-maiden, but the real terror that maddens 
her is that most terrifying of all ancient ghosts, the phantom of 
earth-born Argus. 

'Woe, Woe! 

Again the gadfly stings me as I go. 
The earth-boni neatherd Argos hundred-eyed, 
Earth, wilt thou never hide l 

^ The conception of Dike was largely due to Orpliin influence, see p. 506. 
» V. 988 

t'u) fji,o7pa fiapvdoTeipa fxoyepa. 
iroTvla t' OidiTTov crKia 
fj.iXaiv'' 'Eptvi'S, 17 fi€yaffdevT)s ris d. 
' Aesch. Prom. Vinct. 5<J0. 

* The gadfly is purely incidental to lo in lier primitive form as cow. Oistros 
is an incarnation of the distraction caused by the ghost. On a vase-painting 
representing the slaying of her children by Medea, Oistros (inscribed) is represented 
as a figure in a cliariot drawn by snakes, and near at hand is ' the ghost of Aietes ' 
(inscribed) who sent it. (Arch.'Zeit. 1847, T. 3.) 



218 Demonology of Ghosts, Sjyrites, Bogeys [ch. 

horror ! he is coming, coming nigh, 
Dead, with his wandering eye. 
Uprising from the dead 
He drives me famished 
Along the shingled main, 

His phantom pipe drones with a sleepy strain. 
Ye gods, what have I done to cry in vain, 
Fainting and frenzied with sting-driven pain?' 

But when we come to the Oresteia, the Erinyes are envisaged 
from a different angle. The shift is due partly to the data of the 
plot, the primitive saga out of which it is constructed, partly to 
a definite moral purpose in the mind of the tragedian. 

The primitive material of the trilogy was the story of the 
house of Atreus in which the motive is the blood-curse working 
from generation to generation, working within the narrow limits 
of one family and culminating in the Erinys of a slain mother. 
At the back of the Orestes and Clytaemnestra story lay the 
primaeval thought so clearly expressed b}^ Plato in the Laws'^. 
' If a man,' says the Athenian, ' kill a freeman even unintention- 
ally, let him undergo certain purifications, but let him not dis- 
regard a certain ancient tale of bygone days as follows : " He who 
has died by a violent death, if he has lived the life of a freeman, 
when he is newly dead, is angry with the doer of the deed, and 
being himself full of fear and panic on account of the violence he 
has suffered and seeing his murderer going about in his accustomed 
haunts, he feels terror, and being himself disordered - communicates 
the same feeling with all possible force, aided by recollection, to 
the guilty man — both to himself and to his deeds.'" Here the actual 
ghost is the direct source of the disorder and works like a sort 
of bacillus of madness. It is not the guilty conscience of the 
murderer, but a sort of onset of the consciousness of the murdered. 



1 Plat. Legfj. ix. 865. 

- Mr F. M. Cornford draws my attention to a similar and even cruder English 
superstition. Sir Kenelm Digby, in his Observations on the Religio Medici (5th ed. 
p. 128), maintains as against Sir Thomas Browne who says that apparitions are 
devils, that those that appear in cemeteries and charnel-houses are the souls of the 
dead which have ' a byas and a languishing ' towards their bodies, and that the body 
of a mm-dered man bleeds when the murderer approaches ('which is frequently seen 
in England') because the soul, desiring revenge, and being unable to speak, 'must 
endeavour to cause a motion in the subtilest or most fluid parts (and consequently 
the most moveable ones) of it. This can be nothing but the blood, which then being 
violently moved, must needs gush out at those places where it findeth issues.' 



v] The Curse of the Blood 219 

Its action is local, and hence the injunction that the murderer 

must leave the land. How fully Aeschylus was conscious of this 

almost physical aspect of crime as the action of the disordered 

ghost on the living comes out with terrible vividness in tlie 

Choephori ^ : 

' The black bolt from below comes from the slain 
Of kin who cry for vengeance, and from them 
Madness and empty terror in the night 
Comes haunting, troubling.' 

It is ' the slain of kin ' Avho cries for vengeance. As Pausanias- 

says of the same house, 'the pollution of Pelops and the avenging 

ghost of Myrtilos dogged their steps.' ' Fate,' says Polybius^ 

' placed by his (Philip's) side Erinyes and Poinae and Pointers-to- 

Vengeance (Trpocrr/aoTratou?).' Here clearly all the words are 

synonymous. Apollo threatens the slayer of his mother with 

'Yet other onsets of Erinys sent 
Of kindred blood the dire accomjilishment, 
Visible visions that he needs must mark, 
Aye, though he twitch his eyebrows in the dark*.' 

To cause these ' onsets,' these 7rpoa/3o\al, or, as they are some- 
times called, e(f)o8oi,, was, Hippocrates^ tells us, one of the regular 
functions of dead n;ien. 

Behind the notion of these accesses of fright, these nocturnal 

apparitions caused by ghosts, there is in the mind of Aeschylus the 

still more primitive notion that the shed blood not only ' brings 

these apparitions to effect,' but is itself a source of physical infection. 

Here we seem to get down to a stratum of thought perhaps even 

more primitive than that of the bacillus-like Keres. The Chorus 

in the Choephori sings" : 

' Earth that feeds him hath drunk of the gore, 
Blood calling for vengeance flows never more, 
But stiftens, and ])icrces its way 
Through the murderer, breeding diseases that none may allay.' 

1 Aesch. Choeph. 285. 

- P. II. 18. 2 TO filafffia to IlAoiroj Kal 6 'MvpTi\ov TrpoaTpdwaioi rjKoXo^Orjffe. 

3 XXIII. 10. 2. 

■» Choeph. 282. In the interpretation of tliis passage I follow Dr Verrall, 
Choephori, ad v. 286. 

^ Hijipocr. Trepi Uprji vovaov, p. 123, 20 biroaa ok oeZ/uara vvKrbs iraplararaL Kal 
<f>6^oi Kal wapdvoML Kal dfaTTTjo^creis (k K\ivrjs ' EKarrji (paalv dvai iiri^ovXa^ Kal r]p<^wv 
f(p6oovs. 

« AcHch. Choeph. 64. Tlie Hame iilea comes out in tlie Electra of Euripides 
(v. 318). 



220 Demonologn of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

The blood poisons the earth, and thereby poisons the murderer 
fed by earth. As Dr Verrall (ad loc.) points out, it is the old 
doctrine of the sentence of Cain, ' And now art thou cursed from 
the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's 
blood from thy hand ; when thou tillest the ground, it shall not 
henceforth yield unto thee her strength.' 

In the crudest and most practical form, this notion of the 
physical infection of the earth comes out in the story of Alcmaeon. 
Pausanias^ tells us that when Alcmaeon had slain his mother 
Eriphyle, he came to Psophis in Arcadia, but there his disease 
nowise abated. He then went to Delphi, and the Pythia taught 
him that the only land where the avenger of Eriphyle could not 
dog him was the newest land which the sea had laid bare subse- 
quently to the pollution of his mother's blood, and he found out 
the deposit of the river Achelous "and dwelt there. There, by the 
new and unpolluted land he might be nourished and live. ApoUo- 
dorus^ misses the point : he brings Alcmaeon to Thesprotia and 
purifies him, but by the luaters of Achelous. 

The case of Alcmaeon does not stand alone. It has a curious 
parallel in the fate that befell Bellerophon, a fate that, I think, 
has not hitherto been rightly understood. 

In Horner^ the end of Bellerophon is mysterious. After the 
episode with Sthenoboea, he goes to Lycia, is royally entertained, 
marries the king's daughter, rules over a fair domain, begets three 
goodly children, and then, suddenly, without warning, without 
manifest cause, he comes to be 

' Hated of all the gods. And in the Aleian j^lain apart 
He strayed, shunning men's foot-prints, consuming his own heart.' 

Homer, with a poet's instinct for the romantic and mysterious, 
asks no questions ; Pindar^ with his Olympian prejudice saw in 
the downfall of Bellerophon the proper meed of ' insolence.' 
Bellerophon's heart was ' aflutter for things far-off,' he had vainly 



longed for 



The converse of high Zeus 



c^ 



1 P. VIII. 24;. 8 and 9 /cat avrbv rj Hvdla 5i5daKfL top 'Epi<pu\ris oKdffTopa es tol^ttiv 
ol fxovTjf X'^P'^" o"^ (TvvaKoKovdriaeiv tjtis iari vewTdrr], Kai rj 0d\a<xcra rod /j.T;Tpi^ov 
/xidcr/j-aros dvecp-qvev vcrrepov avTr)v. Kai 6 /nev e^ei/pwi' rod 'AxeXi^ov Trjv Trpocrxi^cnv 
evTOLvda ujK-qae. 

- Apollod. III. 7. 5. » II. VI. 200. * Find. Isth. v. 66. 



v] The Curse of the Blood 221 

But the mythographers knew the real reason of the madness 
and the wandering, knew of the old sin against the old order. 
Apollodorus^ says : ' Bellerophon, son of Glaukos, son of Sisyphos, 
having slain unwittingly his brother Deliades, or, as some say, 
Peiren, and others Alkimenes, came to Proetus and was purified.' 
On Bellerophon lay the tahoo of blood guilt. He came to Proetus, 
but, the sequel shows, was not purified. In those old days he 
could not be. Proetus sent him on to the king of Lycia, and the 
king of Lycia drove him yet further to the only land where he 
could dwell, the Aleian or Cilician plain-. This Aleian plain was, 
like the mouth of the Acheloiis, neiu land, an alluvial deposit 
slowly recovered from the sea, ultimately in Strabo's time most 
fertile, but in Bellerophon's days a desolate salt-marsh. The 
madness of Bellerophon — for in Homer he is obviously mad — is 
the madness of Orestes, of the man blood-stained, Erinys-haunted ; 
but the story of Bellerophon, like that of Alcmaeon, looks back to 
days even before the Erinys was formulated as a personality, to 
days when Earth herself was polluted, poisoned by shed blood. 

Aeschylus then in the Oresteia is dealing with a primitive story 
and realizes to the uttermost its primaeval savagery. But he has 
chosen it for a moral purpose, nay more, when he comes to the 
Eumenides, with an actual topical intent. He desires first and 
foremost by the reconciliation of old and new to justify the ways 
of God to men, and next to show that in his own Athenian law- 
court of the Areopagus, those ways find their fullest practical 
human expression. That court, he somehow contrived to believe, 
or at least saw fit to assert, was founded on a fact of tremendous 
moral significance, the conversion of the Erinyes into Semnae. 
The conception of the Erinyes comes to Aeschylus from Homer 
almost full-fledged ; his mythological data, unlike his plots, were 
' slices from the great feasts of Homer,' and this in a very strict 
sense, for, owing no doubt partly to the primitive legend selected, 
he has had to narrow somewhat the Homeric conception of the 
Erinyes and make of them not avengers in general, but avengers 
of tribal blood. Moreover he has emphasized their legal character. 

1 Apollod. II. 2. 3. 

- For this information as to the character of the Aleian plain, which suggested 
the view in the text, I am indebted to the kindne.-;H of Trot'. l!amsay. 



222 Demonology of Gliosis, Sjjrites, Bogeys [ch. 

It is noteworthy that when Athene formally asks the Erinyes who 
and what they are\ their answer is not ' Erinyes ' but 

'Curses our name in haunts below the earth.' 

And when Athene further asks their function and prerogatives 
{Tifiai) the answer is : 

'Man-slaying men we drive from out their homes'^.' 

The essence of primitive law resided, as has already (p. 142) 
been seen, in the curse, the imprecation. Here the idea is not 
that of a cosmic Fate but of a definite and tangible curse, the 
curse of blood-guilt. It is scarcely possible to doubt that in 
emphasizing the curse aspect of the Erinyes, Aeschylus had in 
his mind some floating reminiscence of a traditional connection 
between the Arae and the Areopagus. He is going to make the 
Erinyes turn into Semnae, the local Athenian goddesses invoked 
upon the Areopagus : the conception of the Erinyes as Arae makes 
as it were a convenient bridge. The notion of the Erinyes as 
goddesses of Cursing is of course definitely present in Homer, but 
it is the notion of the curse of the broken oath rather than the 
curse of blood-guilt. In the great oath of Agamemnon^ he, as 
became an Achaean, prays first to Zeus, but also to Earth and to 
the Sun and to the Erinyes who 

' Beneath the earth 
Take vengeance upon mortals, whosoe'er 
Forswears himself.' 

Hesiod^ borrowing from Melarapus, tells us that 

' On the fifth day, they say, the Erinyes tend 
Oath at his birth whom Eris bore, a woe 
To any mortal who forswears himself.' 

Aeschylus narrows the Homeric and Hesiodic conception of the 
Erinyes to the exigencies of the particular legend he treats; they are 
for him almost uniformly the personified Curses that attend the 
shedding of kindred blood, though now and again he rises to the 
cosmic conception of Heracleitus, as when the chorus in the 
Eumenides exclaim ^ 

' O Justice, O ye thrones 
Of the Erinyes,' 

1 Aesch. Euin. All. "■ lb. 421. » II. xix. 258. 

4 Hes. Erg. 803. ^ Aesch. Euin. 511. 



v] The Tragic En'ni/es 223 

and chant the doom that awaits the transgressor in general ; but 
the circumstances of the plot compel a speedy return within 
narrower limits. 



The Tragic Erinyes. 

The Erinyes in Homer are terrors unseen : Homer who lends to 
his Olympians such clear human outlines has no embodied shape 
for these underworld Angry Ones ; he knows full well what they 
do, but not how they look. But Aeschylus can indulge in no 
epic vagueness. He has to bring his Erinyes in flesh and blood 
actually on the stage ; he must make up his mind what and who 
they are. Fortuuately at this point we are not left with a mere 
uncertain stage tradition or the statements of late scholiasts and 
lexicographers. From Aeschylus himself we know with unusual 
precision how his Erinyes appeared on the stage. The priestess 
has seen within the temple horrible things ; she staggers back in 
terror to give — for her horror-stricken state — a description remark- 
ably explicit. The exact order of her words is important^ : 

' Fronting the man T saw a wondrous band 
Of women, sleeping on the seats. But no ! 
No women these, but Gorgons— yet methinks 
I may not liken them to Gorgon-shapes. 
Once on a time I saw those pictured things 
That snatch at Phineus' feast, but these, but these 
Are wingless — black, foul utterly. They snore, 
Breathing out noisome breath. From out their eyes 
They ooze a loathly rheum.' 

The whole manner of the passage arrests attention at once. 
Why is Aeschylus so unusually precise and explicit ? Why does 
he make the priestess midway in her terror give this little archaeo- 
logical lecture on the art-types of Gorgons and Harpies ? The 
reason is a simple one ; the Erinyes as Erinyes appear for the first 
time in actual definite shape. Up to the time when Aeschylus 
brought them on the stage, no one, if he had been asked what an 
Erinys was like, could have given any definite answer; they were 
un.seen horrors which art up to that time had never crystallized 
into set form. The priestess is literally correct when she says" : 
'This race of visitants ne'er have I seen.' 

1 Aescb. £um. 46 fif. '^ t'- 57. 



224 DemonoloijD of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

Aeschylus had behind him, to draw from, a great wealth of bogey 
types ; he had black Keres, such as those on the shield of Herakles ; 
he had Gorgons, he had Harpies, but he had no ready-made shape 
for his Erinyes, only the Homeric horror of formlessness. What 
will he do ? What he did do is clearly set forth by the priestess. 
When she first, in the gloom of the adyton, catches sight of the 
sleeping shapes, she thinks they are women, they have something 
human about them ; but no, they are too horrible for women, they 
must be Gorgons. She looks a little closer. No, on second thoughts, 
they are not Gorgons ; they have not the familiar Gorgon mask ; 
there is something else she has seen in a picture, Harpies, ' those 
that snatch at Phineus' feast,' Can they be Harpies ? No, again, 
Harpies have wings, and these are wingless. Here precisely came 
in the innovation of Aeschylus ; he takes the Harpy-type, loath- 
some and foul, and rids them of their wings. It was a master- 
touch \ shifting the Erinyes from the region of grotesque impossible 
bogeydom to a lower and more loathsome, because wholly human, 
horror. 

The ' Gorgon shapes,' which indeed amount almost to Gorgon 
masks — so characteristic is the ugly face with tusks and protruding 
tongue — have been already fully discussed (p. 187), but for clearness' 
sake another illustration, which can be securely dated as before 
the time of Aeschylus, may be added here. The design in fig. 45 
is from a black-figured olpe in the British Museum-, It is signed 
by the potter Amasis {"Afiacrl'i fz iTrolrjcrev), and dates about the 
turn of the 6th and 5th centuries B.c, The scene depicted is the 
slaying of the Gorgon Medusa by Perseus. Medusa is represented 
with the typical ugly face, protruding tusks and tongue. On her 
lower lip is a fringe of hair ; four snakes rise from her head. She 
wears a short purple chiton, over which is a stippled skin with 
two snakes knotted at the waist. She has high huntress-boots 
and two pairs of wings, one outspread the other recurved. The 
essential feature of the Gorgon in Greek art is the hideous mask- 
like head ; but she has usually, though not always, snakes somewhere 
about her, in her hair or her hands or about her waist. The wings, 

1 A master-touch from the point of view of Aeschyhis, who is all for the new 
order. It is however impossible to avoid a regret that he stooped to the cheap 
expedient of blackening the Erinj-es as representatives of the old. He thereby 
half alienates our sympathies. See 'Delphika,' J.H.S. xix. 1899, p. 251. 

2 Cat. B -±71. Vorlegebllitter 1889, Taf. ii. la. 



V] 



The Erinys in AH 



225 



also a frequent though not uniform appendage, are sometimes two, 
sometimes four. In common with the Harpy, to whom she is so 




Fig. 45. 

near akin, she has the bent knee that indicates a striding pace. 
That Harpy and Gorgon are not clearly distinguished is evident 
from the vase-painting already discussed (p. 176, fig. 18), in which 
the Gorgon sisters of Medusa are inscribed in the dual, ' Harpies ' 
('Ap67ri/ia). 

Broadly speaking the Gorgon is marked off from the Harpy 
by the mask-face. The Harpy is a less monstrous form of Gorgon, 
but at worst there was not much to choose between them. We 




Fig. 46. 



sympathize with the hesitation of the priestess, when we com[)are 
the Medusa-Gorgon of the Amasis vase (fig. 45) witli the un- 

H. 1-^ 



226 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

doubted Harpies of the famous Wlirzburgi cylix (fig. 46). Here 
we have dej)icted the very scene remembered by the priestess, 
'those pictured things that snatch at Phineus' feast.' The vase is in 
a disastrous condition, and the inscriptions present many difficulties 
as well as uncertainties, but happily those that are legible and 
certain are sufficient to place the subject of the scene beyond 
a doubt. It would indeed be clear enough without the added 
evidence of inscriptions. Phineus to the right reclines at the 
banquet, attended by women of his family, whose names present 
difficulties and need not here be discussed. The Harpies- (Ape...), 
pestilential unclean winds as they are, have fouled the feast. But for 
the last time they are chased away by the two sons of Boreas, Zetes 
and Kalais, sword in hand. The sons of the clean clear North 
Wind drive away the unclean demons. All the winds, clean and 
unclean, are figured alike, with four wings each; but the Boreadae 
are of course male, the women Harpies are draped. 

Before returning to the tragic Erinyes, another vase must be 




Fig. 47. 



discussed. The design, from an early black-figured cylix in the 
Louvre^ is reproduced in fig. 47. The centre of interest is clearly 



1 Wiirzburg, Inc. 354. 

2 The Phineus cylix is published in phototype by Carl Sittl, 'Die Phineus 
Schale, und ahnliche Vasen,' Programm xxv., forming part of the Jahreshericht dea 
WofjiieriscJien Kunst-Institiits der Kgl. Universitdt Wurzburg, 1892. The account 
there given of the difficult inscriptions is inadequate and must be supplemented by 
reference to Dr Bohlau's corrections in his paper on ' Die lonischen Augenschalen,' 
A. Mitt. 1898 (xxiii.) pp. 54, 77; see also Furtwiingler-Reinhold, PL 41. 

» Pettier, Cat. A. 478, pi. 17. 1. The vase is further discussed by Mr Barnett, 
Hermes, 'Miscellen,' 1898, p. 639. Mr Barnett sees in the winged figure Iris, an 
interpretation with which I cannot agree. 



v] The Erwijs in Art 227 

the large dog, a creature of supernatural size, almost the height 
of a man. To the left of him a bearded man is hastening away ; 
he looks back, apparently in surprise or consternation. Immediately 
behind the dog comes a winged figure, also in haste, and manifestly 
interested in the dog. Behind her is Hermes, and behind him, as 
quiet spectators, two women figures. There is only one possible 
explanation of the general gist of the scene. It is the story of the 
golden dog of Minos stolen from Crete by Pandareos, king of 
Ljxia, and by him from fear of Zeus deposited with Tantalos. 
The scholiast on the Odyssey^ tells the story in commenting on 
the lines 'As when the daughter of Pandareos the bright brown 
nightingale ' as follows. ' There is a legend about the above- 
mentioned Pandareos, that he stole the golden dog of Zeus in 
Crete, a life-like work of Hephaistos, from the precinct of Zeus, 
and having stolen it he deposited it with Tantalo.s. And when 
Zeus demanded the stolen thing by the mouth of Hermes Tantalos 
swore that he had it not. But Zeus when he had yot the dos; 
again, Hermes having secretly taken it away, buried Tantalos 
under Sipylos.' Another scholiast- gives a ditferent version, in 
which judgment fell on the daughters of Pandareos. ' Merope 
and Kleothera (daughters of Pandareos) were brought up by 
Aphrodite ; but when Pandareos, having received the dog stolen 
from Crete in trust for Tantalos, denied that he ever took it, 
Merope and Kleothera were snatched away by the Harpies and 
given to the Erinyes.' 

In the light of this version the vase-painting is clear. The 
moment chosen is the coming of Hermes to claim the dog. It is 
no use Pandareos denying he had it, for there it is, larger than 
life. The vase-painter had to put the dog in, to make the story 
manifest. The two women spectators are the daughters of Pan- 
dareos, Merope and Kleothera. Who is the winged figure ? 
Archaeologists variously name her Iris, a Harpy, an Erinys. 
Iris I unhesitatingly reject. Between a Harpy and an Erinys 
the choice is harder, and the doubt is instructive. Taking into 
consideration the Lycian character of the story, and the not 
unimportant fact that the design of the reverse represents a 
Lycian myth also, Bellorophoii ;ind the Chiinnci'.i, 1 think we 

' Schol. ad Od. r 518 and 1'. x. 30. 2. I'iud. Schul. 1)1. i. IMt. 
- Schol. Ambros. 13. ad r 51H. 

15—2 



228 Demonologij of Ghosts, Sirrltes, Bogeys [ch. 

may safely say that the figure is a Harpy, but it is a Harpy 
performing the functions of an Erinys, avenging the theft, aveng- 
ing the broken oath, come also to fetch the two maidens whom 
she will give to be handmaids to the hateful Erinyes — so near 
akin, so fluctuating are the two conceptions. 

The fact then that Aeschylus brought them on the stage and 

his finer poetical conception of horror compelled the complete and 

human formulation of the Erinyes ; before his time they have no 

definite art-type. The Erinyes of Aeschylus are near akin to 

Gorgons, but they lack the Gorgon mask ; nearer still to Harpies, 

but wingless. It is curious and interesting to note that at the 

close of the Ghoephori'^, where they do not appear on the stage, 

where they are visible only to the imagination of the mad Orestes, 

he sees them like the shapes he knows — 

' These are like Gorgon shapes 
Black-robed, with tangled tentacles entwined 
Of frequent snakes.' 

Aeschylus felt the imaginative gain of the purely human form, 




[^trr^TMfiPii^ir^iF^ HMJif^irMJ 



Fig. 48. 



but his fellow artist the vase-painter will not lightly forego the 
joy of drawing great curved wings. In vases that are immediately 

1 Aesch. Choeph. 1048. The noisome exudation from the eyes noted by Aeschylus 
(Eum. 54) has already been shown (p. 195) to be characteristically Gorgon. 



V] 



Influence of Aescliyhis 



229 



post-Aeschylean the wingless type tends to prevail, though not 
wholly; later it lapses and the great fantastic w^ngs reappear. On 
the red-figured vase-painting^ in fig. 48 — the earliest of the series 
and dating somewhere towards the end of the 5th century — we 
have the scene of the purification of Orestes. He is seated close 
to the omphalos — sword in hand. Above his head Apollo holds 
the pig of purification, in his left hand the laurel ; to the right 
is Artemis as huntress with spears ; to the left are the sleeping 
wingless Erinyes; the ghost of Clytaemnestra beckons to them to 
wake. From the ground rises another Erinys, a veritable earth 
demon. The euphemism of the vase-painter makes the Erinyes 
not only wingless but beautiful, as fair to see as Clytaemnestra, 
The next picture- (fig. 49) is later in style, but far more 




Fi.i. 41). 

closely under dramatic infiuence. We have the very opening 
scene of the Euvienides. The inner shrine of the temple, a small 

1 Monivienti dell' Iiixt. iv. pi. IS. BaunieiHter, p. 1314. The vase, an o.rijhapln'n, 
is now ill the Louvre. 

'■^ Hermitage, Cat. i. 'Ai'J. Stoph.ini, Comptf Itendit, iHfia, pi. vi. 5. 



230 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

Ionic naos, the omphalos, and the supplicant Orestes, with no 
Apollo to purify ; the frightened priestess holding the symbol 
of her office, the great temple key with its sacred fillet. All 
about the shrine are lying the Erinyes, wingless and loathly; the 
scanty dishevelled hair and pouting barbarous lips are best seen 
in the rightmost Erinys, whose face is drawn profile-wise. 

In the third representation^ from a krater formerly in the Hope 
Collection (fig. .50) the style is late and florid, and the vase-painter 




Fig. 50. 

has shaken himself quite free from dramatic influence. Orestes 
crouches in an impossible pose on the great elaborately decorated 
omphalos; Apollo is there with his filleted laurel staff. The place 
of Artemis is taken by Athene, her foot resting on what seems 
to be an urn for voting. To the left is an Erinys, in huntress 
garb, with huge snake and high curved wings ; but the vase- 
painter is indifferent and looks for variety: a second Erinys, who 
leans over the tripod, is well furnished with snakes, but has no 
wings. 



1 Millin, Peintiires des vases grees, ii. 68. Baumeister, fig. 131-5, p. 1118. 



V] 



The Erinyes as Poinae 



231 



In the last and latest of the series, a kalpis in the Berlin 
Museum^ (fig. 51), the Erinys is a mere angel of vengeance; her 
wings are no longer fantastic, she is no huntress, but a matronly, 
heavily draped figure ; 
she holds a scourge in 
her hand, she is more 
Poine than Erinys, only 
about her is still curled 
a huge snake. 

Aeschylus then, we 
may safely assert, first 
gave to the Erinyes 
outward and visible 
shape, first differen- 
tiated them from Keres, 
Gorgons, or Harpies. 
In this connection it is 
worth noting that the 
Erinyes or Poinae were 
not infrequently re- 
ferred to in classical 
literature as though 
they were almost the 
exclusive property of 
the stage. Aeschines^ 
in his oration against 
Timarchus, exhorts the 

Athenians not to imagine ' that impious men as in the tragedies 
are pursued and chastised by Poinae witli blazing torches.' 
Plutarch-' in his life of Dion tells how, when the conspiracy of 
Callippus was on foot against him, Dion had a ' monstrous and 
portentous vision.' As he was meditating alone one evening he 
heard a sudden noise and saw, for it was still light, a woman of 
gigantic size, ' in form and raiment exactly like a tragic Erinys.' 
She was sweeping the house with a sort of broom. 

On Lower Italy vases th(! Erinyes as Poinae fr('i|uciitly ;i])pear 




Fig. 51. 



' Jahrhuch d. Inst. lH!iO, Anzeiger, p. W. 
* AeHchin. <■. Tini. HO. 



riut. I'it. ninii. c. ;".'). 



232 Demonologii of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

(Chap. XI.). They are sometimes winged, sometimes unwinged. 
From the august ministers of the vengeance of the dead they have 
sunk to be the mere pitiless tormentors of hell. They lash on 
Sisyphos to his ceaseless task, they bind Peirithoos, they fasten 
Ixion to his wheel. But it is curious to note that, though the 
notion of pursuit is almost lost, they still wear the huntress garb, 
the short skirt and high boots. It is needless to follow the down- 
ward course of the Erinys in detail, a course accelerated by 
Orphic eschatology, but we may note the last stage of degradation 
in Plutarch's treatise ' On those who are punished by the Deity 
late\' The criminals whom Justice (Dike) — the Orphic divinity 
of purification rather than vengeance — rejects as altogether in- 
curable are pursued by an Erinys, ' the third and most savage of 
the ministrants of Adrasteia.' She drives them down into a place 
Avhich Plutarch very properly describes as ' not to be seen, not 
to be spoken of.' The Erinyes are from beginning to end of the 
old order, implacable, vindictive ; they know nothing of Orphic 
penance and purgatory; as 'angels of torment-' they go to people 
a Christian Hell. 

The Erinys as Snake. 

We return to Aeschylus. His intent w^as to humanize the 
Erinyes that thereby they might be the more inhuman. The 
more horrible the shape of these impersonations of the old 
order the greater the miracle of their conversion into the gentle 
Semnae, and yet the easier, for so early as we know them the 
Semnae are goddesses, human as well as humane. 

In his persistent humanizing of the Erinyes Aeschylus suffers 
one lapse, the more significant because probably unconscious. 
When Clytaemnestra would rouse the Erinyes from their slumber, 
she cries ^ 

' Travail and Sleep, chartered conspirators, 
Have spent the fell rage of the d7'agoness.' 

It is of course possible to say that she uses the word 
' dragoness ' (BpaKULva) ' poetically,' for a monster in general, 

^ Plut. de ser. num. I'ind. xxii. 

- dyyeXoi ^aaavLarai in the Apocalypse of Peter; see Dieterich, Kekuia, p. 61. 

3 Aesch. Eum. 126. 



ri 



v] The Ennys as Snake 233 

possibly a human monster; but the question is forced upon us, wh)' 
is this particular monster selected ? why does she say ' dragoness ' 
and not rather ' hound of hell ' ? In the next lines^ comes the 
splendid simile of the dog hunting in dreams, and it would 
surely have been more 'poetical' to keep the figure intact. But 
language and associations sometimes break through the best 
regulated conceptions, and deep, very deep in the Greek mind 
lay the notion that the Erinys, the offended ghost, was a snake. 
The notion of the earth demon, the ghost as snake, will be con- 
sidered when hero-worship is dealt with (p. 325). For the present 
it can only be noted in Aeschylus as an outcrop of a lower 
stratum of thought, a stratum in which the Erinys was not yet 
an abstracted or even humanized minister of vengeance, but 
simply an angry ghost in snake form. 

The use of the singular number, 'dragoness,' is, in itself, 
significant. The Erinyes as ministers of vengeance are indefinitely 
multiplied, but the old ghost-Erinys is one, not many; she is the 
ghost of the murdered mother. Clytaemnestra herself is the real 
' dragoness,' though she does not know it, and by a curious un- 
conscious reminiscence the Erin3-es sleep till she, the true Erinys, 
rouses them. 

The mention by Aeschylus of the ' dragoness ' does not stand 
alone. To Euripides also the Erinys is a snake. In the Iphigeneia 
in Tauris"^ the mad Orestes cries to Pylades, 

' Dost .see her, her the Hades-snake who gapes 
To slay me, with dread vipers, open-mouthed ? ' 

Here it can hardly be said that the conception is borrowed from 
Aeschylus, for assuredly the stage Erinyes of Aeschylus, as he 
consciously conceived them, were in no wise snakes. Moreover 
the ' Hades-snake ' confu.ses the effect of the ' dread vipers ' 
that follow. In his Orestes also^ Euripides makes the Erinyes 
' maidens with the forms of snakes,' where it is straining language, 
and quite needlessly, to say that the word SpaKovT(oSei<; means 
' having snakes in their hands or hair.' 

Art too has these barkings back to the primitive snake 
form. The design in fig. 52 is from a black-figured amphora in 

1 V. 131. ■■' Eur. Iph. in T. 28(J. 

^ Eur. Or. -i.lf;. 



234 Demonologij of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

the Vatican Museum \ dating about the turn of the 6th and 
5th centuries B.C. We have 
the usual striding flying 
type, the four wings, the 
huntress boots — a type of 
which, as has been shown, it 
is hard to say whether it re- 
presents Gorgon or Harpy. 
There is no context to decide. 
One thing is clear. The vase- 
painter is afraid that we shall 
miss his meaning, shall not 
understand that this winged 
thing striding through the 

air is an earth demon, so he -pia 5-> 

paints below, moving pari 
passu, a great snake. The winged demon is also a snake-. 




1 Passerius, Pict. Etrusc. in. 297. J.H.S. vol. xix. 1899, p. 219. This 
representation does not stand alone. Among the fragments of vase-paintings 
fomid in the excavations on the AcroiDolis, and as yet unpublished, is one of 
considerably earlier style than the design in fig. 52, and with a representation 
exactly similar in all essentials. The winged feet and part of the drapery of 
the figure remain, and below is a large snake with open mouth. Found as it was 
in the ' pre-Persian ' debris, this fragment cannot be later and is probably much 
earlier than 480 b.c. 

- This striding flying pose with the bent knee has been used by some archaeo- 
logists to explain the epithet Kafi^piiroi's. But bending or turning the knee is not 
bending or turning the foot. It is possible that in this epithet applied (Aesch. 
SejJt. 791) to the Erinys we have merely an expression of the instinct to create an 
uncouth deformed bogey. M. Paul Perdrizet {Jlelusine, vol. ix. 1898, p. 99, 'Les 
pieds ou les geuoux k rebours ') makes the interesting suggestion that the Kap.\p'nrovs 
'YipLvvs may be an Erinys with feet turned the reverse way, a horrid distorted 
cripple. This peculiar form of deformity was not unknown among the ancients, as 
witness the statuettes cited as examples by M. Perdrizet, a bronze in the British 
Museum (Cat. Walters, no. 216) and a terracotta in the National Museum at Athens 
(Cat. 1^11: Stackelberg, Griiher der Hellenen, pi. lxxiii. 475). I do not feel 
confident of the Tightness of this intei'pretation for two reasons, firstly, Kafx^pi-n-ovs 
seems scarcely to be the right epithet for a striking distortion which would rather 
be arpe^XoTTovs or some such word, and secondly, constant stress is laid on the 
swiftness of the Erinys which would be inconsistent with a crippling deformity. 
On the other hand, figures with their feet reversed may have suggested the inevitable 
back-coming of the Erinys. Mr F. M. Cornford suggests to me that Kafx\p'nrov$ is 
the humanized equivalent of ya/xypQw^, an interpretation proffered by Blomfield 
but rejected in favour of pernix. The suggestion seems to me to carry fresh 
conviction now that the Erinys is seen to be in her original essence and in her 
art-form near akin to Harpy, Sphinx and Bu'd-woman. Sophocles (Oed. Tyr. 1199) 
calls the Sphinx -yafx^Qivv^. In fig. 43 she is claw-footed ; the Harpy to the right 
in fig. 18 has crooked claws for hands. Aeschylus may be using an epithet that 
originally meant ' clutch-foot ' in some new sense as ' plying the foot,' i.e. swift, 
or as ' back-returning.' 



V] 



The Erinys as Snale 



•235 



Most clearly of all the identity of ghost and snake comes out 
in the vase-painting in fig. 53 from 
an archaic vase of the type known 
as ' prothesis ' vases, in the Museum 
at Athens^ They are a class used 
in funeral ceremonies and decorated 
with funeral subjects. Two mourners 
stand by a grave tumulus, itself sur- 
mounted by a funeral vase. Within 
the tumulus the vase-painter depicts 
what he believes to be there. 
Winged eidola, ghosts, and a great 
snake, also a ghost. Snake and 
eidolon are but two ways of saying 
the same thing. The little flutter- 
ing figures here represented are 
merel}^ harmless Keres, not angry 
vindictive Erinyes, but when the 

Erinys developes into an avenger she yet remembers that she is 
a snake -ghost. 

The Gorgon, too, has her snakes. To the primitive Greek 
mind every bogey was earth-born. In the design in fig. 54^ 




Fig. 53. 




Fig. 54. 

we have the slaying of the Gorgon Medusa. Tiic inscriptions are 
not clearly legible, but the scene is evident. Perseus attended 
by Athene and one of the nynii)hH, who gave him the kibisis and 

1 A. Mitt. XVI. p. 379. J.H.S. xix. 1B99, p. 210, ««. 4. 

■^ Vienna Museum. Masner, Cat. 221. Jnntili dAV hint. IBC.G, Tav. cV nuR. 11. 2. 



236 DemonoJogy of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

helmet and winged sandals, is about to slay Medusa. Medusa is 

of the usual Gorgon type, but she holds in her hand a huge snake, 

the double of herself. 

But the crowning evidence as to the snake-form of the Erinys 

is literary, Clytaemnestra's dream in the Choej)hori. Clytaemnestra 

dreams that she gives birth to and suckles a snaked Dr Verrall 

(ad loc.) has pointed out that the snake is here the regular symbol 

of things subterranean and especially of the grave, and he conjectures 

that the snake may have been presented to the eyes of the audience 

by ' the visible tomb of Agamemnon which would presumably be 

marked as a tomb in the usual way.' I w^ould go a step further. 

The snake is more than the symbol of the dead ; it is, I believe, 

the actual vehicle of the Erinys. The Erinys is in this case not 

the ghost of the dead Agamemnon, but the dead Agamemnon's 

son Orestes. The symbol proper to the ghost-Erinys is transferred 

to the living avenger. Orestes states this clearly- : 

' Myself in serpent's shape 
Will slay her.' 

And this, not merely because he is deadly as a snake, but because 
he is the snake, i.e. the Erinys. 

Again, when Clytaemnestra cries for mercy, Orestes answers^ : 
' Nay, for my father's fate hisses thy doom.' 
The snake-Erinys in the Eumenides, and here again in the 
Choephori, remains of course merely an incidental survival, import- 
ant mainly as marking the road Aeschylus has left far behind. 
It is an almost unconscious survival of a tradition that conceived 
of the Erinyes as actually ghosts, not merely as the ministers of 
ghostly vengeance. 

Before we leave the snake-Erinys, one more vase-painting must 
be cited, which brings this conception very vividly before us. The 
design in fig. 55 is from an early black-figured amphora of the class 
known as ' Tyrrhenian,' formerly in the Bourguignon collection at 
Naples^ The figure of a woman just murdered lies prostrate over 

1 Aesch. Choeph. 527 and 531. 2 ^,. 549, 

3 V. 927 

irarp'os yap alcra Tovoe crvpi^ei fiopov, 
accepting Dr Veriall's reading crvpi^ei.. 

■* Jahrbuch d. Inst. 1893, p. 93, pi. i. The vase is there interpreted as the slaying 
of Polyxena, but I agree with Dr Thiersch {Tyrrhenisclie Amphoren, p. 56) that the 
scene represented is the slaying of Eriphyle by Alcmaeon. In connection with the 
omphalos-tomb of the vase-painting it is worth noting that at Phlius near the house 
of divination of Amphiaraos there was an omphalos. See P. 11. 13. 7. 



V] 



The Et'inyes of Sophocles 



237 



an omphalos-shaped tomb. The warrior who has slain her escapes 
with drawn sword to the right. But too late. Straight out of 
the tomb, almost indeed out of the body of the woman, rises a 
huge snake, mouthing at the murderer. The intent is clear ; it is 




00. 



the snake-Erin3's rising in visible vengeance. The murderer is 
probably Alcmaeon, who has just slain his mother Eriphyle. His 
story, already discussed (p. 220), is as it Avere the doable of that 
of Orestes. The interpretation as Alcmaeon is not quite certain. 
It does not however affect the general sense of the scene, i.e. a 
murderer pursued by the instant vengeance of a snake-Erinys. 

Before passing to the shift from Erinyes to Semnae it may be 
well to note that another tragedian — priest as well as poet — held 
to the more primitive view, realized definitely that the Erinyes, 
the avengers, were merely angry implacable Keres, To Sophocles 
in the Oedipus Tyrannus^ Apollo is the minister, not, as in the 
Eamenides, of reconciliation, but of vengeance. He has taken 
over the functions of the Erinyes. With the lightning and fire 
of his father Zeus he leaps full-armed upon the guilty man ; 

' Sopli. Oi'd. Tyi: U]'.). The attitude of Soi)liocleK towards tlie Orestes myth, 
aud the fasliion in wliicli he ignores the contiict l)et\veen Apullo and tiie Erinyes, 
cannot be discussed here. It has been ably treated by Miss .Janet Case in the 
Clamiical Review, May 1902, p. 195. 



238 Demonoloffy of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

but even Apollo cannot dispense with the ancient avengers. With 

him 

' Dread and unerring 
Follow the Keres.' 

The Keres here are certainly regarded as a kind of Fate, but to 

translate the word 'Fates' is to precipitate unduly the meaning. The 

word calls up in the poet's mind\ not only tlie notion of ministers 

of vengeance, but also the reminiscence of ghostly fluttering things. 

He says of the guilty man : 

' Fierce as a bull is he, 
Homeless, with desolate foot he seeks to flee 
The dooms of Gala's central mound. 
In vain, they live and flit ever around.' 

Again, in the ElecU'a of Euripides'-, though the Erinyes are 

fully personified as dog-faced goddesses, yet they are also Keres. 

' They hunt you like dread Keres, goddesses 
Dog-faced, in circling madness.' 

Here the word Keres seems to be used because Moirae is of too 
beneficent and omnipotent association ; Keres keeps the touch of 
personal ghostly vengeance. 

To resume : the Erinyes are attributive epithets of ghosts, 
formless in Homer, but gradually developed by literature, and 
especially by the genius of Aeschylus, into actual impersonations. 
In accordance with this merely attributive origin it is not 
strange that qua Erinyes their cult is practically non-existent. 
In only one insta.nce do we hear of a definite place of worship for 
the Erinyes as sucJi. Herodotus^ tells us that at Sparta the 
children of the clan of the Aegidae 'did not survive.' Accordingly 
in obedience to an oracle the Aegidae ' made a sanctuary to the 
Erinyes of Laios and Oedipus.' 

Here the Erinyes are plainly offended ancestral ghosts, de- 
structive to the offspring of their descendants, and demanding to 
be appeased. In so far as they are ghosts, the ghosts of murdered 
or outraged men, the Erinyes were of course everywhere pro- 
pitiated, but rarely under their 'Angry' name. That the natural 
prudence of euphemism forbade. As abstract ministers of 
vengeance we have no evidence of their worship. Clytaemnestra* 

1 V. 475. 2 Eur. El. 12.52. 

3 Herod, iv. 149. ■» Aesch. Faiiu. 106. 



v] The 'Semnai Theai' 239 

indeed recounts in detail her dread service to the Erinyes, but 
when closely examined it is found to be merely the regular ritual of 
the dead and of underworld divinities ; it has all the accustomed 
marks, the 'wineless libations' and the 'nephalia for propitiation, 
the banquets by uight ' offered on the low brazier (ea-x^dpa) 
characteristic of underworld sacrifice (p. 62). The hour was one, 
she adds, ' shared by none of the gods.' What she means is none 
of the gods of the upper air, the Olympians proper: it was an hour 
shared by every underworld divinity. Aeschylus has in a word 
transferred the regular ritual of ghosts to his partially abstracted 
ministers of veno-eance, and has thereby left unconscious witness 
to their real origin. 



The 'Semnai Theai.' 

To these Erinyes, adjectival, cultless, ill-defined, the Venerable 
Goddesses {ae/xval deal) present a striking contrast. If the Erinyes 
owe such substance and personality as they have mainly to poets, 
to Homer first, later to Aeschylus and the other tragedians, with 
the Semnae it is quite otherwise. Their names are of course 
adjectival — almost all primitive cultus names are — but from the 
first, as we know them, they are personal and local. The Erinyes 
range over earth and sea, the Semnae are seated quietly and 
steadfastly at Athens. They are the objects of a strictly local 
cult, never emerging to Pan-Hellenic importance. But for the 
fact that Aeschylus was an Athenian we should scarcely have 
realized their existence ; they would have remained obscure local 
figures like the Ablabiae and the Praxidikae. 

In this connection it is of cardinal importance that, thougii we 
are apt to speak of them as the Semnae, the Venerable Ones, this 
is not their cultus title, not the fashion in which they were 
actually addressed at Athens. They are uniformly spoken of, not 
as the Venerable Ones, but as the Venerable Goddesses' (ai acfival 
deal). The distinction is important. It marks the fact that the 
Semnae from the first moment they come into our view jiave 

' Pausanias (i. Hi. 2) mentions onr otlun place in Attica whcie tlie Senniat- me 
worshipped under thi.s name. At I'lilva in one and tlie same wanctuary tliere were 
altars of Demetor Anesidora, of Zuuk KtesioH, of Atiicne Titlnone, of Kore Protogone 
and of goddusses called Venerable (^(/xfuv dvofxa^oixivwv OtCiv). 



240 Demonology of Ghosts, S])rites, Bogeys [ch. 

attained a complete anthropomorphism, have passed from ghosts 
to goddesses^ ; they are clearly defined personalities with a definite 
cultus; they are primitive forms, in fact the primitive forms, of 
earth goddesses, of such conceptions as culminated finally in the 
great figures of Demeter and Kore. Other such figures are, for 
Athens the two Thesmophoroi, who are indeed but developments, 
other aspects, of the Semnae ; for Eleusis the ' two goddesses,' too 
dew, known to us by inscriptions and reliefs ; for Aegina Damia 
and Auxesia ; and for the rest of Greece many another local form, 
dual or triune, which need not now be enumerated. The process 
of this gradual anthropomorphism, this passage from sprite and 
ghost and demon to full-fledged divinity will be fully traced when 
we come to the ' making of a goddess ' (p. 257). For the present it 
can only be noted that the term ' goddesses ' sharply differentiates 
the Semnae from the Erinyes, who, save for sporadic literary 
mention, never attained any such rank. Euripides^ does indeed 
make Orestes call the Erinyes 'dread goddesses,' but Aeschylus^ 
is explicit : ' their adornment (Koafio^) was neither human nor 
divine.' It must be distinctly understood that, as the Semnae 
are goddesses, they are dealt with at this point only by anticipa- 
tion, to elucidate the transformation effected by Aeschylus. 

What we certainly know of the Semnae, as distinct from 
kindred figures such as the Eumenides, is not very much, but 
such as it is, is significant. We know the site of their sanctuary, 
something of the aspect of their images, something also of their 
functions and of the nature of their ritual. We know in fact enough, 
as will be shown, to feel sure that like the Erinyes they were 
underworld potencies, ghosts who had become goddesses. The 
origin of the two conceptions is the same, but their development 
widely different, and moreover we catch it arrested at a different 
stage. 

It is obvious from the play of the Eumenides that the worship 
of the Semnae at Athens was of hoary antiquity. It is true that 
Diogenes Laertius'^ states (on the authority of the augur Lobon) 

1 The best evidence of this is the language, always ceremonial, of oaths taken in 
the law courts, where we may be sure the Semnae are invoked by their official title, 
e.g. Deinarchus c. Dem. 47. Maprvpo/xaL rds tre/tt^'a.s Oeds, w duopes 'AdijvawL. But so 
far as I am aware the Semnae are never alluded to merely as Semnae. 

- Eur. Or. 259. , ^ Aesch. Eion. 55. 

•* Diog. Laert. i. x. 6. See Demoulin, Epivienide de Crete, p. 110. 



v] The ' Semnai TheaV 241 

that the sanctuary of the Semnae at Athens was founded by 
Epimenides. The scene of the operations of Epimenides was un- 
doubtedly the Areopagos, but, as the purification of Athens took 
place in the 46th Ohnnpiad, the statement that he founded the 
sanctuary must be apocryphal. Very likely he may have revived 
and restored the cult. Diogenes says that he took a number of 
black and white sheep and led them up to the Areopagos and 
thence let them go whither they would, and he commanded those 
who followed them to sacrifice each of them wherever the sheep 
happened to lie down, and so the plague would be stayed. 
Whence even now, adds Diogenes, you may find in the Athenian 
demes nameless altars in memory of this atonement. Some such 
altar as this was still to be seen at or near the Areopagos when 
St Paul preached there, and such an altar may have become 
associated with the Semnae, who like many other underworld 
beiugs were Nameless Ones. 

The site of the worship of the Semnae was undoubtedly some 
sort of cave or natural chasm amplified artificially into a sanctuary. 
Such caves, clefts or chasms are, as has already been shown (p. 125), 
the proper haunts of underworld beings ; they are also usually, 
though not uuiformly, primitive. Of the sanctuary and the cultus 
images Pausanias^ speaks as follows. After describing the Areo- 
pagos and the two un wrought stones called ' Transgression ' 
{vj3pL<i) and ' Pitilessness ' {avaiheia) on which accused and accuser 
stood, he says * And near is a sanctuary {Upov) of the goddesses 
whom the Athenians call Semnae, but Hesiod in the TJieo<jony 
calls Erinyes. Aeschylus represents them with snakes in their 
hair, but in their images there is nothing frightful, nor in the 
other images of the underworld gods that are set up. There is a 
Pluto also and a Hermes and an image of Ge. And there those who 
have been acquitted in a suit before the Areopagos sacrifice. And 
others besides sacrifice, both strangers and citizens, ajid within 
the enclosure there is the tomb of Oedipus.' 

Pausanias by his reference to Aeschylus betrays at once the 
source of his identification of the Semnae with the Erinyes. The 
statement cannot be taken as evidence that prior to Aeschylus 
any such identification was current. After the time of Aeschylus, 

» P. I. 28. G. 
11. IG 



242 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

classical writers, except when they are quoting ritual formularies, 
begin to accept the fusion and use the names Erinyes, Eumenides, 
and Semnae as interchangeable terms. A like laxity unhappily 
obtains among modern commentators. 

The statement of Pausanias, that about the cultus images of 
the Semnae there was nothing frightful, is important, as showing 
how foreign to the Semnae was the terror-haunted conception of 
the tragic Erinys. Aeschylus might fuse the Erinyes and the 
Semnae at will, but the cultus images of the Semnae take on no 
attribute of the Erinyes. About these cultus images we learn 
something more from the scholiast on Aeschinesl Commenting 
on the Semnae he says ' These were three in number and were 
called Venerable Goddesses, or Eumenides, or Erinyes. Two of 
them were made of lychnites stone by Scopas the Parian, but the 
middle one by Kalamis.' Here again we must of course discount 
the statement as regards the triple appellation, at least for a date 
preceding Aeschylus. The number of the statues is noticeable. 
At the time when the scholiast or his informant" wrote the images 
were unquestionably three. The origin and significance of the 
female trinities will be considered later (p. 286). For the present 
it is sufficient to note that the trinity was probably a later stage 
of development than the duality. From the notice of the scholiast 
we cannot be certain that the images were originally three ; nay 
more, it looks as if there was some reminiscence of a duality. 
Moreover the scholiast on the Oedipus Coloneus^ expressly states 
that according to Phylarchus the images of the Semnae at Athens 
were two in number. He adds that according to Polemon they 
were three. That the number three ultimately prevailed is highly 
probable, indeed practically certain. The scholiast on Aeschines 
goes on to say ' the court of the Areopagos adjudged murder cases 

1 Schol. ad Aeschin. c. Timarch. i. 188c 'rats ae/xvals deals.' Tpeis rjcrav avrai 
al \ey6/j.evai ae/xvai deal ri Ei'/xertSes ri '^pLvvves, (Hv ras fieu dvo ras eKarepisidev 
S/c6:ras 6 lldpios ireiroiyjKev eK ttjs XlxvLtov Xidov Tr]v 8e fxeariv KaXa/Uts. oi 5e 
' ApeoTrayTrai rpels irov rod firjubs ij/xipas ras (povLKas SiKCts ediKa^'ov eKaaTT] twu dewy 
fxiav 7]fxipav a.irovipLOVTe%. tjv 8e to, Tre/HTro/xeva avrals lepa wbirava Kal ydXa ev ayyecn 
KepafieioLS. (pacri fxevTOL avras Ttjs elvai Kal S/coroi'S, oi 8e ^kStovs Kal Hivwvvfxrjs rjv 
Kal Ttjp 6voixd'{eadaL, KXr/drjuaL de 'Ev/j.evioas eTriTjpearepoi' [de conj. : eTriijpa Vat. eirl 
'OpeffTOV cett.] Trpuirov KaXoiifx^vas. 

- Dr Wellmann (de Istro 14) Las shown that in all probability the information 
of the schohast is borrowed from the treatise of Polemon quoted by Clement of 
Alexandria in his Protrepticus, p. 41. 

^ Schol. ad Oed. Col. 39 ' ^p-cpo^oi deal.' ^vXapxos (pr](n ovo avras elvai to. re 
dydXtxara 'Xd7}VT]<n ovo, IloXe/xwc de rpels avrds (prjai. 



v] The 'Semnai TJieaV 243 

on three days in each month, assigning one day to each goddess.' 
The three days Avere probably a primitive institution, three being 
a number sacred to the dead, and these three days may have 
helped the development of the threefold form of the Semnae. 
Later in considering the Charites and other kindred shapes (p. 286) 
it will be shown that many different strands went to the weaving 
of a trinity. The strictly definite number of the Semnae, be it 
two or three, is in marked contrast to the indefinite ' wondrous 
throng' {davfxaaroq Xoxo'i) of the Aeschylean Erinyes. The 
contrast may have been softened, if in the concluding scene the 
chorus of Erinyes filed away in groups of three. 

The sanctuary of the Semnae was, in the narrower sense of 
the word ' sanctuary,' a refuge for suppliants. This is, of course, 
a trait that it has in common with many other precincts. Thucy- 
dides^ tells how in the conspiracy of Kylon some of the con- 
spirators sat down at the altars of the Venerable Goddesses, and 
were put to death at the entrance. A monument, the Kyloneion, 
was put up close to the Nine Gates to expiate 'the pollution. 
Plutarch-, in his account of this same conspiracy, adds a curious 
primitive touch : the conspirators connected themselves with the 
image of ' the goddess ' by a thread, believing thereby they would 
remain immune ; the thread broke of its own accord when they 
reached the Semnae ; this was taken as an omen of rejection and 
they were put to death. Aristophanes twice alludes to the 
precinct of the Semnae as a place of sanctuary. In the Kniglits^, 
he makes the outraged triremes say 

' If this is what the Atlienians like, we must needs set sail forthwith 
And sit us down in the Theseion or in the Semnae's shrine.' 

In the Thesmoplioriazusae* , when Mnesilochus is about to make 

ofif in a fright, Euripides asks 

'You villain, where are you oft" to?' 

and the answer is 

•To the shrine of the Semnae.' 

It is noticeable that in both these cases the name given to 

the goddesses of sanctuary is Semnae, not Erinyes or Eumenides. 

1 Thucyd. i. 12G. "•' Pint. Vit. Si»l. xn. 

3 Ar. Eq. I.'il2 

r,v 5' apiaKri ravr' '\dr]vaioii KaOfja-dai (xoi OoKfi 
is t6 iiriadoi' ir\(ovcras t] Vi tQi' ffe/xvLOV Oiwv. 

^ At. Thexm. 224 

ETl'. ouTos ail voi Otts; 

yiS. is TO TUIV <JifXvQ>V lhC}V. 

h; 2 



244 Demonolofiy of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [en. 

The confusion of the three was never local, only literary, and by 

the time of Aristophanes it has not yet begun. 

Euripides 1 is our solitary authority for the fact that the 

sanctuary was also oracular. At the close of the Electra he 

makes the Dioscuri, in a speech not untinged by irony, prophesy 

that Orestes, pursued by the Erinyes, will come to Athens and 

be acquitted by the equal vote, and that in consequence the 

baffled Erinyes will descend in dudgeon into a subterranean cleft 

hard by the Areopagos : 

' A rnantic shrine, 
Sacred, adored of mortals.' 

Oracular functions were ascribed to most, if not all, underworld 
divinities, so that it is quite probable that the description of the 
Dioscuri is correct. 

The sanctuary of the Semnae was open to suppliants and to 
those who sought oracular counsel, but to one unfortunate class 
of the community, happily a small one, it was rigidly closed. 
These were the people known as 'second-fated ' or ' later-doomed.' 
Hesychius^ in explaining the term ' second-fated ' (SeurepoTroTyuo?), 
says ' he is called by some " later-doomed." So a man is termed 
when the accustomed rites have been performed as though he 
were dead, and later on he reappears alive ; and Polemon says that 
to such it was forbidden to enter the sanctuary of the Venerable 
Goddesses. The term is also used of a man who is reported to 
have died abroad and then comes home, and again of a man who 
passes a second time through the folds of a woman's garment, as 
was the custom among the Athenians in a case of second birth.' 

This curious statement is fortunately explained to' us in in- 
structive detail by Plutarch in the answer to his 5th Roman 
Question. He theie says ' Those who have had a funeral and 
sepulture as though they were dead are accounted by the Greeks 
as not pure, and they will not associate with them, nor will they 
permit them to approach sanctuaries. And they say that a certain 
Aristinus, who believed in this superstition, sent to Delphi to 
enquire of the god and to ask release from the disabilities this 
custom imposed on him, and the Pythian made answer : 

" Whatsoe'er is accomphshed by woman that travails in childbed, 
That in thy turn having done, sacrifice thou to the gods." 

1 Eur. El. 1270. - Hesych. s.v. devrepd-n-oT/xo^. 



v] Tlie 'Semnai TheaV 245 

And Aristinus being a good and wise man gave himself up, like 
a new-born child, to the women to wash and swaddle and suckle, 
and all the otliers who were called " later-doomed " did the like.' 
'But,' adds Plutarch, and doubtless most justly, 'some say that 
these things were done with respect to the " later-doomed " before 
Aristinus did them, and the custom was an ancient one.' 

Plutarch says the exclusion was from all sacred rites. In 
this he is probably mistaken. Anyhow in the case of the Semnae, 
and of all underworld divinities, the significance is clear. If 
a man comes back to life after burial rites, the reason to the 
primitive mind is that there is something wrong with him ; he is 
rejected by the powers below and unfit to mingle with his fellows 
in the world above ; he is highly taboo. Despised of the gods, 
he is naturally rejected of his fellow men. The only chance for 
him is to be born again. 

When we come to the ritual of the Semnae every detail con- 
firms the view that they are underworld beings. From Aeschylus 
himself^ we know that (Kpayia, animal sacrifices consumed but 
not eaten, were offered to them. Athene bids the Erinyes, after 
they have turned Senmae, 

'pass below the earth 
With these your sacred sphagia.' 

The underworld nature of sphagia — the word has no English 
equivalent — has been fully discussed (p. 63). In careful writers, 
as has been seen, it is never interchangeable with lepela, victims 
sacrificed and eaten. 

The scholiast on Sophocles^ speaks of the holocaust of a black 

sheep to the Eumenides, whom he identifies with the Semnae; but, 

as he expressly states that this sacrifice took place in the Pelopon- 

ne.se, we cannot safely attribute it to the local Semnae of Athens. 

It is probable that a-cftdyia formed part of the regular sacrifice 

mentioned by Pausanias as offered to the Semnae by the acquitted; 

a(f)ayia belong, as has already been shown, to the class of expiatory 

offerings. It was on a(f>dyia, which were also called rofxia, that 

1 Aesch. Eum. 1006 

tre Kal acpaylwv tcDi/S' virb <tc/j.i'u)v 
Kara yrjs aufitvai. 

''■ Schol. ad Soph. Oed. Col. 4'2 ' rdj irdvO' opwffas Eufxtuldai' Tdrt yap irpCnov 

Vjvuivloas KX-ijdfjvai (v/xeyiU KpiO^vri. vikolv trap' 'AOrjvaloii xal oXoKavTrjaai avrat^ oif 
Ix^Xaivav if Kapvtiff. [the rcailiiiK Kapfilqi in doiil)tfiil| rijs lit XoTroi'fvjcroi'. <I>i,\^^w»' 



246 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

oaths were taken (p. 64) in the law courts, oaths the extraordinary 
solemnity of which Demosthenes^ emphasizes. A man so swearing 
stood on the fragments of victims officially and solemnly slain, and 
devoted himself and his household to destruction in case of perjury. 
By standing on the slain fragments he identities himself proleptically 
with them. We have no explicit statement that the divinities by 
whom these awful oaths on the TOfiia had to be taken were the 
Semnae, but as the Seranae were the underworld divinities resident 
on the Areopagos, and as they were frequently invoked with the 
local heroes, and as sacrifice was done to them by the acquitted, it 
seems highly probable. If they were the goddesses of oaths, this 
is another link with the Erinyes, the avengers of oaths. It is 
notable that in an ordinary imprecation in the law-courts they 
take precedence of Athene herself. Thus Demosthenes^ says, 
' I call to witness the Venerable Goddesses, and the place they 
inhabit, and the heroes of the soil, and Athene of the city, and the 
other gods who have the city and the land in their dominion.' 

We learn from Philo^ that no slave was allowed to take part 
in the processions of the Semnae. This in a worship of special 
antiquity and solemnity is natural enough. But it is strange to 
hear from Polemon'* that there was the same taboo on all the 
Eupatrids. Strange at first sight, but easily explicable. The 
Semnae are women divinities, and in this taboo on the Eupatrids 
there seems to lurk a survival of matriarchal conditions. Aeschylus 
in the Eumenides is not concerned, save incidentally, to emphasize 
the issue between matriarchy and patriarchy, between kinship 
through the mother and through the father, but it lies at the 
back of the legend he has chosen for his plot. The stories of 
Orestes and Clytaemnestra, of Alcmaeon and Eriphyle, are deep- 
rooted in matriarchy — both look back to the days when the only 
relationship that could be proved, and that therefore was worth 
troubling about, was that through the mother ; and hence special 

1 Dem. c. Aristocr. p. 642. ^ Dem. c. Dein. 47. 

^ Philo de praest. liher p. 886 b did fiot doKoCffiv oi tQi> 'EWtjvwv o^vdepKiaTaTot 
'Ad7]udloi T7)v eiri rals crefivais deals TrofXTTTjv orav areW^^cn SovXov firjbiva TrpocrXa/j.jiai'ei.v. 

* Scbol. ad Soph. Oed. Col. 489 ' dtrvcxTa (pcouQv.' tovto airb rrjs dpoofj.evTjs 0valas 
Tois Ei^yUeciVf /uerd yap rjcrvxi-as to. iepa dpibai Kal 8ia tovto oi /xev aTro Havxov Bvovaiv 
avTal% Kadanrep Ho\ifxwv iv tols irpbs 'EpaTocrdivT^v (prjffiv ovtu, to 8i tQv EvwaTpidwi' 
yivo% oil yaer^X" '^^^ 6vaias TavTr)s. elra e^fjs' ttjs S^ TrOyUTTTjs raiTTjS 'HcruxiSat 6 5?; 
yivos icTTi Trepi Tas ^efiuas ^eas Kai Ty]v riyefMoviav ^x^'- '^'^' TrpoGvovrai irpb r^s dvalas 
Kpibv 'Hffi'xv iepbv, TJpw tovtov ovtw Ka\ovvTe% 8ia ttju ev(p7}fxiav ov Tb lepbv wapa to 
TLvKdiveiof e/cros tujv ivvea ttvXQv. 



y] The ' Semnai Theai' 247 

vengeance attends the slayer of the mother. In the light of this 
it is easy to understand why in the worship of the Semnae the 
family of Eupatrids — those well-born through their fathers — had 
no part. For them Apollo Patroos was the fitter divinity. The 
family of the Eupatrids had their own rites of expiation, ancestral 
rites significantly called irdrpia, paternal. These rites as described 
by Dorotheos have been already discussed (p. 60). 

The name of the family that held the priesthood of the Semnae 
is also recorded ; they were the Hesychidae whom Hesychius^ 
describes as 'a family of well-born people at Athens.' Polemon 
is again our authority for connecting these ' Silent Ones ' with the 
cult of the Semnae. He is quoted by the scholiast already cited 
(p. 246 note). In commenting on the expression ' uttering words 
inaudible ' the scholiast says ' This is from the sacrifice performed 
to the Eumenides. For they enact the sacred rites in silence, and 
on account of this the descendants of Hesychos (the Silent One) 
sacrifice to them, as Polemon says in his writings about Erato- 
sthenes, thus : " the family of the Eupatrids has no share in this 
sacrifice " ; and then further, " in this procession the Hesychidae, 
which is the family that has to do with the Venerable Goddesses, 
take the lead." And before the sacrifice they make a preliminary 
sacrifice of a ram to Hesychos... giving him this name because 
of the ritual silence observed. His sanctuary is by the Kyloneion 
outside the Nine Gates.' 

Though these remarks of the scholiast are prompted by the 
cult of the Eumenides at Colonos, it is quite clear that Polemon 
is speaking of the Semnae at Athens. He states three important 
facts. The cult of the Semnae was in the hands of a clan descended 
from a hero called aetiologically ' the Silent One.' Sacrifice to the 
goddesses was regularly preceded by the sacrifice of a ram to the 
eponymous hero. That hero had a sanctuary of his own outside 
the Nine Gates of the old Pelasgic fortification, and near the 
historic monument of Kylon. The name 'Silent One' is possibly 
a mere cultus epithet, used to preserve safely the anonymity of 
the hero; heroes, as will later (p. 339) be seen, are dangerous persons 
to mention. On the other hand Hesychos may have been the 
actual name of a real hero, and after his death it may have seemed 
charged with religious significance. This seems (]uite jiossible, 
the more so as the name was adopted by the whole family. The 

' HcHych. B.v. 7^co5 ' AOTfjvrjffiv lOayivQv. 



248 Demonologji of Ghosts, Sj^rites, Bogeys [ch. 

female form Hesychia was a proper name in the days of Nikias, 
and it is curious to find that even then an omen could be drawn 
from it. Plutarch^ recounts that when the Athenians were taking 
omens before the Syracusan expedition an oracle ordered them to 
fetch a pi'iestess of Athene from Clazomenae. They found, when 
they got her, that her name was Hesychia ; and this seemed ' a 
divine indication that they should remain quiet.' 

The scholiast speaks of Hesychidae, male members of the family 
of Hesychos, but if we may trust Callimachus- it was the women 
of the family who brought burnt-offerings ; and these offerings 
were, as we should expect, wineless libations and honey-sweet 
cakes. The name of the priestesses was according to Callimachus 
XrjTetpaL, and it is no doubt from this source that Hesychius^ gets 
his gloss, ' Leteirai, priestesses of the Semnae.' 

The Semnae were women divinities served by priestesses, and 
it is noticeable that Athene, who was ' all for the father,' promises 
to the Erinyes that, if they become Semnae, they shall have 
worshippers, both men and women ^ But when the procession to 
the cave is actually formed, in strict accordance no doubt with the 
traditional ritual of the place, it is women attendants who bring 
the ancient image, 

'A goodly band, 
Maidens and wives and throng of ancient dames^.' 

It can scarcely be doubted that among these ancient dames were 

members of the clan of Hesychids. 

Aeschylus'' has left us other notes of underworld significance 

in the ritual of the Semnae. When the procession is forming for 

the cave Athene speaks : 

' Do on your festal garments crimson-dyed 
For meed of honour, bid the torches flame — 
So henceforth these our visitants shall bless 
Our land and folk with shining of their grace.' 

1 Plut. Vit. Nik. XIII. 

2 Callim. frg. (Schneider, ii. 123) 

N?70d\:' at Kai rrjcnv del ij,e\irj8^as ofXTruas 
XrireipaL KaieLv iWaxov HciixiSe?. 
* Hesych. S.v. AriTeipai' Upecai tCcv aefivQiv deCiv. 
4 Aesch. Eum. 85(3. ^ ^^ i026. 

6 Aesch. Eum. 1028 

(poivLKOJidTrTOis evdvTois iadrjixacnv 
Tifj-dre Kai to (p^yyos opfj-dcrdw TrvpSs, 
OTTUis dv eixppwv rjd'' 6/M\la x^ofios 
rb XoLTTov evdvdpouTi (jvfX(popals irpiTrrj. 
The construction of Tifidre is uncertain, there being no expressed grammatical 
object ; but the two ritual factors, the torches and crimson garments, are certain. 



v] The 'Semnai TheaV 249 

Athene proffers for guerdon to the Semnae the ritual that as iinder- 
world goddesses was ah'eady theirs, torches and crimson raiment. 

In connection with the torches it cannot be forgotten that 
some, though possibly not all, the sittings of the court of the 
Areopagos took place by night, doubtless in honour of the under- 
world goddesses who presided. In Lucian's time, at least, these 
sittings were almost proverbial. He says of a man perceiving 
with difficulty\ 'unless he chance to be stone-blind or like the 
Council of the Areopagos which gives its hearing by night ' : and 
again in the Hermotimus- 'he is doing it like the Areopagites who 
give judgment in darkness.' To these sittings in the night-time 
it may be that Athene refers when she says* 

' This court I set, untouched of gain, revered, 
Alert, a wakeful guard o'er those who sleep.' 

The garments of crimson or purple dye point to a ritual of 
placation and the service of the underworld. This is clearly 
shown in the details given by Plutarch^ of the rites of placation 
performed annually for those who fell in the battle of Plataea. 
' On the IGth day of the month Maimakterion the archon of 
Plataea, who on other days may not touch iron nor wear any 
garment that is not white, puts on a crimson chiton and taking a 
hydria and girded with a sword goes to the sepulchres. There 
with water from the spring he washes the stelae and anoints 
them with myrrh ; he slays a black bull, prays to Zeus and 
Hermes Chthonios, and invokes to the banquet and the blood- 
shed the heroes who died for Greece.' 

The crimson-purple is blood colour', hence it is ordained for 
the service of the dead. It has already been noted (p. 144) that 
Dion*' when he took the great oath in the Thesmophorion identi- 
fied himself with Kore of the underworld by putting on her 
crimson robe and holding a burning torch. Purple, Pliny^ tells us, 
was employed when gods had to be appeased. 

> Luc. de domo 18. - Luc. Ilennot. 806. 

3 Aesch. Eum. 700. •* Plut. Vit. Arintid. xxi. 

' Cf. ai'/nari <()0iv6v {II. xvi. LW). (f)oii>6s, (polvt^ and (pdvoi arc not fur asunder: 
cf. also the tragic use of atfxa for corpse. For jiurplo in the ritual of the dead, see 
Diels, SibyUinm-lit: liVitUr, p. (i!) note. Since tlie above was written Dr Headlani 
has conclusively shown that the crimson worn hy the Seinna<! marks tlioni as 
/jJtoikoi^ see his 'Last Scene of the Kumenidos,' J. U.S. xxvi. I'JOd, j). •2V,H. 

* Plut. Vit. Dion. i.vi. Trepi^iXXfTai tt)v iropcpvplda ttJs OtoO Kal \a(iwi> d^8a 
Kaiotiivrju a.TrSfj.viiai. 

^ Hin. N. 11. IX. 00 purpura dis advocatur phxcandis. 



250 Deinonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

The purple robes, the torches, the night-time, above all the 
<T<pdyLa, point to a dread underworld ritual, a ritual that shows 
clearly that the darker side of the Venerable Ones was not far 
remote from the Erinyes. But Aeschylus, whose whole mind is 
bent on a doctrine of mercy, naturally emphasizes the brighter 
side of their functions and worship. Athene^ herself knows that 
they are underworld goddesses, that they must have low-lying 
altars and underground dwellings ; only so seated will they ever 
feel really at home. She remembers even that for their feast they 
must have the wineless sacrifice that drives them mad"; but she 
bids them leave this madness, and they for their part promise that 
the earth, their kingdom as vengeful ghosts, shall cease to drink 
the black blood of citizens. Henceforth they will be content with 
the white side of their serviced 

' From this great land, thine is the sacrifice 
Of first-fruits oftered for accomplishment 
Of marriage and for children*.' 

Again Athene offers what was theirs from the beginning. 
Underworld goddesses presided 
over marriage : in later days, as 
Plutarch^ tells us, it was the 
priestess of Demeter ; earlier we 
can scarcely doubt it was the 
Semnae. Here they stand in 
sharp contrast to tiie Erinyes, who 
are all black. Who would have 
bidden an Erinys to a marriage 
feast ? as well bid Eris who, in 
form (fig. 56) and function as 
perhaps in name, was but another 
Erinys, Eris 




Fig. 56. 



' The Abominable, who uninvited came 
And cast the golden fruit upon the board.' 



1 Aesch. Eum. 804. The significance of the e^xo-po- as distinguished from the 
/Sw/ios has been already discussed (p. 61). 

2 Aesch. Eum. 860. 

3 Aesch. Eum. 980. 

^ Plut. Conj. Praec. Proem, fxera tov irarpiov decrfj-bf 5v vfuv i] ttJs Arj/jLTjrpos Upeia 
(Xvvetpyvvfiei'oi.? i<prjpiJ.O(rev. 



v] The 'Semnal TheaV 251 

The Erinyes transformed to Semnae ask Athene what spells 
they shall chant over the land. She makes answer^: 

' "Whatever charms wait on fair Victory 
From earth, from dropping dew and from high heaven, 
The wealth of winds that blow to hail the land 
Sunlit, and fruits of earth and teeming flocks 
Untouched of time, safety for human seed.' 

The chorus accept these functions of health antl life, and chant 
their promised guerdon-. 

' No wind to wither trees shall blow. 
By our grace it shall be so ; 
Nor that nor shrivelling heat 
On budding plants shall beat 

With parching drouth 

To waste their growth, 
Nor any plague of dismal blight come creeping ; 

But teeming, doubled flocks the earth 

In her season shall bring forth, 

And evei'more a wealthy race 

Pay reverence for this our grace 
Of spirits that have the rich eartli in their keeping.' 

We are reminded that Ploutos himself, the Wealth of the 
underworld, had, according to Pausanias-', a statue in the precinct 
of the Venerable Goddesses. ]\Ioreover it is impossible to hear the 
words 'no wind to wither trees shall blow' without recalling the 
altar of the Wind-stillers (Eu^az^eyiiot), which stood somewhere on 
the western slope of the Areopagus. Arrian'*, speaking of the 
statues of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, says 'they stand at Athens 
in the Cerameicus where we go up to the citadel, just opposite 
the Metroon not far from the altar of the Wind-stillers. Whoever 
has been initiated in the Eleusinia knows the altar of the Wind- 
stillers which stands on the ground.' A low-lying altar doubtless, 
an eschara, for, as has already been shown (p. 65), the winds were 
to primitive thinking ghosts or caused by ghosts and worshipped 
with underworld sacrifices. Hesychiiis* tells us that there was at 
Corinth a family called the Wiml-calmers. The Areopagos was a 

' Aesch. Eiim. 903. 

2 AcBch. Knm. 03H. The translation offered only attempts to render the general 
Rense of this dilHcult passaK*;, a sense siilliciciitly clear Inr the iiimiiMliatc purpose. 
No satisfactory explanation has yet been offered of the enigmatic t6 /j.t] irtpav opov 
tLttusv, sec Dr Verrall, ad lac. 

3 P. I. 28. G. 

* Arrian, Anah. in. KJ. H. 
" Hesych. s.v. 'Avt/j.oKotTai. 



252 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

wind-swept hill. It was thence, according to a form of the legend 
recorded by Plato \ that Boreas caught up Oreithyia. 

The Semnae claim as their special 'grace-' control over the 
winds. As goddesses who bring the blessings of marriage and of 
fertile breezes, they are but good fructifying Keres like the 
Tritopatores already discussed (p. 179); the Erinyes are blighting 
poisonous Keres, who Harpy-like foul the food by which men live. 

The Erinyes, in the play of Aeschylus, are transformed into 
Semnae, into the local goddesses of Athens. Of this there is no 
shadow of doubt. They accept the citizenship of Pallas^ and they 
are actually hailed as Semnae*. Aeschylus it is true never 
definitely states that they entered the cleft of the Areopagos, 
but Euripides, manifestly borrowing from him, is as has been 
seen explicit. 

Sucli a conversion may have been gratifying to the patriotism 
of an Athenian audience, but Athenian though he is, it is not the 
glorification of a local cult that inspires Aeschylus ; it is the re- 
conciliation of the old order of vengeance with the new law of 
mercy. It is significant in this connection that Aeschylus, or 
some one who took his meaning, gave to the play the title, not as 
we should expect of Semnae, but of Eumenides. The moral of the 
play is thereby emphasized. 

It is, to say the least, curious that a play called traditionally, 
if not by the author, the 'Eumenides' should contain no single 
mention of the Eumenides by this name, Harpocration', com- 
menting on the word Eumenides, says 'Aeschylus in the Eumenides, 
recounting what happened about the trial of Orestes, says that 
Athene, having mollified the Erinyes so that they did not deal 
harshly with Orestes, called them Eumenides.' Aeschylus says no 
such thing. The text of the play contains no mention of the 
Eumenides, though in the hypothesis prefixed to the text occur 

1 Plat. Fhaedr. p. 229. The legend no doubt took its rise in the Areopagos, 
where the king's daughter was flower-gathering, or fetching water from the 
Enneakrounos just outside the city gate. It was transplanted later with many 
another legend and cult to the banks of the Ilissus, outside the enlarged city. 

•- Aesch. Eum. 939. 

^ Aesch. Eum. 916 d^^o/xai IldXXaSos ^woLKiav. 

■* V. 1041 SeOp' ire, cnixvai. 

■' Harpocrat. s.v. Ei},aei'i5£S...Ai(TX(5Xos ev FiVnevLcnv dir^v to, irepl ttjv Kpiaiv rrju 
'Opearov (ptjcrlv ws t) ^ Adi]va wpavvaaa rds 'Epiwas wore /U.i7 x^XeTuij ^X^"' ""pos rbv 
^Op^dTTjv Ei'/aew'Sas dii'6/xacev, elcrl 5e 'AXry/crti, M^yaipa. TKTKpbvrj. 



v] The Eumenides 253 

the following words : ' Having prevailed by the counsel of Athene, 
he (Orestes) went to Argos, and when he had mollified the 
Erinyes he addressed them as Eumenides'.' Harpocration attri- 
butes to Athene in the play what the hypothesis notes as done by 
Orestes in the sequel at Argos. By his use of the word ' mollified ' 
(Trpavvaaa) he betrays, I think, the souice of his information. It 
must always be remembered that the Orestes legend was native 
to Argos and at Argos the local cult was of Eumenides not 
Semnae. 

The Eumenides. 

The worship of divinities bearing the name of Eumenides, 
though unknown at Athens-, was wider-spread than that of the 
Semnae, which is found nowhere outside Attica. It was possibly 
for this reason that Aeschylus or later tradition gave this name 
to the play. The Semnae were familiar figui-es at Athens, and, 
spite of many underworld analogies, the shift from Erinyes to 
Semnae must have been a difficult one. A great deal is borne for 
the glory of the gods, but there must have been among the audience 
men conservative and hard-headed who would be likely to maintain 
that, all said and done, the Erinyes were not, could not be, Semnae. 
If asked to believe that the Erinyes became Eumenides, they 
would feel and probably say: that is a matter for Colonos, for 
Argos, for Sekyon to consider; it affects no Athenian's faith or 
practice. At Colonos it is certain that goddesses were w^orshipped 
who bore the name of Eumenides, goddesses of function and ritual 
precisely identical with the Semnae, but addressed by a different 
cultus epithet. We have the expre.ss statement of Sophocles*, 
who, as a priest himself and a conservative, was not likely to 

' Aesch. Kuin. li.ypoth....T?s /3ouX^ fiKTjcraj KaTr/Xdev us "Apyos, ras S^ 'Epivvas 
irpavvai irpo<Tr]y6pev(Tev Evfiffioai. To suit the statement of Harpocration, irpavvai 
has been altered to irpavvaca. 

2 There is no evidence tliat can be relied on to show that before Aeschylus wrote 
his play the Semnae ever bore the title of Eumenides. Pausiuiias indeed (vii. 2r). 1) 
quotes an oracle from Dodona ostensibly belont^int,' to the mythical days of A])lioida8, 
in which the title Eumenides is given to the goddesses of the Areopagos, 
<f>pdi;^eo 5' "ApeiSy re wdyov, pw/xoin re Ovw5tii 
Ku/xevlouv ktX. 
And this oracle, he says, the Greek called to mind when the Peloponnesians came 
agiiinst Athens in the time of Codrus. The passage stands alone, and onicle- 
niongering was rife at all limes. 

» Soph. Ued. Col. 41. 



254 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. 

tamper with ritual titles. He makes Oedipus ask the stranger 

who they are whose dread name he is to invoke. The answer 

is explicit : 

' Eumenides all-seeing here the folk 
Would call them : other names please otherwhere.' 

Sophocles no doubt shows the influence of Aeschylus in his 
' other names please otherwhere.' He realizes that Eumenides 
and Semnae are 'one form of diverse names^' This truth it was 
the mission of the reconciling monotheist always to preach, but 
he would" scarcely dare to tamper with the familiar titles of 
a local cult. In fact by this very statement, that elsewhere the 
goddesses bore other names, he makes the local appellation certain. 
He may indeed have brought Oedipus to Colonos rather than 
to the Areopagos, where he had also a grave, just because the 
local attributive title of the goddesses at Colonos suited the 
gentle moral of his play. 

Again when Oedipus asks to be taught to pray aright, the 
Chorus lay emphasis on the title Eumenides. 

' That, as we call them Kindly, from kind hearts 
They may receive the suppliant-.' 

So strong is the exclusiveness of local cults that, had the title 
of Eumenides occurred only at Colonos, neither Aeschylus nor 
tradition would perhaps have ventured to assume it for the 
Semnae. But from Pausanias we learn of sanctuaries of the 
Eumenides at Titane^ near Sekyon, at Cerynaea^ in Achaia, and 
in Arcadia near Megalopolis ^ The sanctuary between Sekyon 
and Titane consisted of a grove and a temple. Pausanias ex- 
pressly says these belonged to the goddesses whom the Athenians 
called Semnae and the Sikyonians Eumenides. The festival in 
their honour was a yearly one, and has already been discussed 
(p. 56). Tradition said that the sanctuary at Cerynaea was 
founded by Orestes, and that ' if any one stained by blood or 
any other pollution, or impious, entered the sanctuary wishing 
to see it, he straightway went out of his wits by the terrors he 

1 Aesch. Prom. Vinct. 209 

QefXLs 
Kai Taia ttoWQv ovoixAtlov fiopcpri fxla. 

2 Oed. Col. 486 

(lis dfpas Ka\ou/j.ev Ev/j.€viSas, ef evfievuv 
(TTepvwv Sexecr^at rov lk^ttju. 

3 P. I. 11. 4. •* P. VII. 25. 7. 5 p. VIII. 34. 2. 



V] 



The Eumenides 



255 



tns\ 



beheld. The images in it were made of wood '...and they were not 
large.' The ritual of the sanctuary at Megalopolis, with its black 
and white sides, addressed severally to the goddesses as Madnesses 
(Maniae) and Kindly Ones (Eumenides), has already been noted 
(p. 56). To the Madnesses Orestes sacrifices, it will be re- 
membered, with underworld rites to avert their wrath ; to the 
Kindly Ones when healed, and after the same fashion as to the 
gods ; the clearest possible instance of two stages of development 
in ritual and theology, of dirorpoTrr] side by side with Oepaireia. 

To these four instances of the cult of the Eumenides a fifth 
may safely be added, the sanctuary at or near Argos. Of any 
such sanctuary we have no literary record, but we have what is 
of even greater value — monumental evidence. Three votive reliefs 
dedicated to the Eumenides have been found at the little chui'ch 
of Hag. Johannes, about half-an-hour to the east of the modern 
village of Argos-. They 
are still preserved in 
the local museum of 
the Demarchy. The 
material of all three is 
the hard local lime- 
stone, and they must 
have been set up in a 
local sanctuary. The 
sanctuary of Titane was 
nearly twenty miles 
away, too far to admit 
of any theory of trans- 
portation. All three 
are inscribed, and in 
each the dedicator is 
a woman. The relief 
reproduced in fig. 57 
was found built into 
the outside of the 
Church of Hag. Jo- 
hannes. It is clearly inscribed ^vfieviaiv ev'^dv, a vow or prayer 
to the Eumenides. The beginning of the inscription is lost, but 
enough remains, . . t; A . . eta, to show that a woman dedicated 

' At this point unhappily a lacuna occurs. -' A. Mitt. iv. 187'.>, pi. ix. ji. 17(i. 




Fki. .-j7. 



256 Demonolofpj of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [ch. v 

it, and that she was probably an Argive. It is a woman's 
offering, but she likes to have her husband carved upon it and 
she lets him walk first. Perhaps he went with her to the 
sanctuary and offered sacrifice of honey and water and flowers 
and a ewe great with young^ 

' The first-fruits oftered for accomplishment 
Of marriage and for children.' 

About the figures of the Eumenides at Argos, as of the 
Semnae at Athens, ' there is nothing frightful.' These are not 
the short-girt huntress women of the vases, nor yet the loathly 
black horrors of tragedy ; they are gentle, staid, matronly figures, 
bearing in their left hands, for tokens of fertility, flowers or fruit, 
and in their right, snakes- as the symbols, not of terror and 
torture, but merely of that source of wealth, the underworld ; 
but for the snakes, which lend a touch of austerity, the}' would 
be Charites (p. 297). From the inscriptions these reliefs are 
certainly known to be later than Aeschylus, but because a poet 
writes a great play at Athens the local stonemason does not alter 
the type of the votive offerings he supplies. Why should he 
frighten pious women and perhaps lose his custom ? The Erinys 
of tragedy took strong hold of literature, but even at Athens 
there was a sceptic to whom the great conversion scene was merely 
absurd. If we may trust Suidas*, the comic poet Philemon held 
to it that ' the Semnae were quite other than the Eumenides,' 
and we may be sure that the humour of the situation attempted 
would lose nothing in his hands. Great though the influence of 
Aeschylus over the educated undoubtedly was, it was powerless 
to alter traditional types in art ; equally powerless we may be 
sure to abate or alter one jot or one tittle of hieratic ceremonial. 
The Erinyes remained Erinyes, and in popular bogey form went, 
as has been seen (p. 232), to people with hori'ors a Christian hell, 
Man was not ready yet to worship only the Kindly Ones. For 
generations, nay centuries, he must bear the hard yoke of 
dirorpoTTt] before he might offer to gods remade in his own image 
the free-will offering of a kindly OepaTreia. 

1 The regular ritual offerings at Titane, see P. i. 11. 4 and Aesch. Eum. 834. 

- The archaic marble statuette found at Olympia and representing a woman 
with polos on her head and a snake in each hand may very possibly be one of three 
Eumenides. See Olympia, vol. in. p. 27. 

3 Suidas s.v. TSiU/xevides • ^iXruj.o}!' 8^ 6 KWfiiKbs eripa^ (prjal ras Se/Ufas 6eas tQ>v 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE MAKING OF A GODDESS. 

' OY TAP TH rV^AIKA MeMIMHTAI KYHC6I KAI reNNHCei AAAa TYNH THN.' 

In the last chapter we have traced the development from 
Keres to Erinyes, and have seen that, on the whole, this develop- 
ment was a downward course. The Erinyes are in a sense more 
civilized than the Keres ; they are beings more articulate, more 
clearly outlined and concerned with issues moral rather than 
physical ; but the career they start as angry souls they end as 
Poinae, ministers of vindictive torment ; there is in them no 
element of hope, no kindly impulse towards purification, they 
end where they began as irreconcileable demons rather than 
friendly gods. 

We have further marked the attempt of Aeschylus to turn the 
vindictive demons of the old religion into the gentler divinities of 
the new, and we have seen that, for all his genius, the attempt 
failed wholly. The Erinyes never, save here and there to a 
puzzled antiquarian, became really Semnae ; the popular instinct 
of their utter distinctness remained sound. We have now to note 
that, where the genius of a poet fails, the slow-moving widespread 
instinct of a people may prevail ; ghosts are not wholly angry, and 
the gentler form of ghost may and docs become a god. 

The line between a spirit (8ai/u.o)i>) ami a ii-gular gud (^tov) is 
drawn with no marked precision. The difference is best realized 
by remembering the old principle that ni.m makes all the objects 
of his worship in his own image. Before he lias himself clearly 
realized his own humanity — the line that marks liim "iV lium other 
Ji. 17 



258 The Making of a Goddess [ch. 

animals, he makes his divinities sometimes wholly animal, some- 
times of mixed, monstrous shapes. His animal-shaped gods the 
Greek quickly outgrew ; something will be said of them when we 
come to the religion of the Bull-Dionysos. Mixed monstrous 
shapes long haunted his imagination ; bird-woman-souls, Gorgon- 
bogeys, Sphinxes, Harpies and the like were, as has been seen, 
the fitting vehicles of a religion that was mainly of vague fear. 
But as man became more conscious of his humanity and jmri passu 
grew more humane, a more complete anthropomorphism steadily 
prevailed, and in the figures of wholly human gods man mirrored 
his gentler affections, his advance in the ordered relations of 
life. 

Xenophanes^ writing in the 6th century B.C., knew that God is 
' without body, parts or passions,' but he knew also that, till man 
becomes wholly philosopher, his gods are doomed perennially to 
take and retake human shape. His thrice-familiar words still bear 
repetition : 

' One God there is greatest of gods and mortals ; 
Not like to man is he in mind or body. 

All of him sees, all of him thinks and hearkens 

But mortal man made gods in his own image 

Like to himself in vesture, voice and body. 

Had they but hands, methinks, oxen and lions 

And horses would have made them gods like-fashioned, 

Horse-gods for horses, oxen-gods for oxen.' 

We are apt to regard the advance to anthropomorphism as 
necessarily a clear religious gain. A gain it is in so far as a 
certain element of barbarity is softened or extruded, but with 
this gain comes loss, the loss of the element of formless, monstrous 
mystery. The ram-headed Knum of the Egyptians is to the mystic 
more religious than any of the beautiful divine humanities of the 
Greek. Anthropomorphism provides a store of lovely motives for 
art, but that spirit is scarcely religious which makes of Eros a boy 
trundling a hoop, of Apollo a youth aiming a stone at a lizard, of 
Nike a woman who stoops to tie her sandal. Xenophanes put 
his finger on the weak spot of anthropomorphism. He saw that 
it comprised and confined the god within the limitations of the 
w'orshipper. It is not every religion that advances as far as 
anthropomorphism, but the farthest of anthropomorphism is not 
very far. 

^ Xenoj)h. fig. 1, 2, 5 and 6. 



YI] 



Atitliroijomorph ism 



259 



Traces of animal form are among the recognized Greek gods 
few and scattered. Pausanias^ heard at Phigaleia of a horse- 
headed Demeter, and again of a fish-bodied Eiuynome- whom 
some called Artemis, but for the most part by the 6th and 5th 
centuries B.C. mixed forms, half animal, half human, belong to 
beings half-way between man and god, demons rather than full- 
fledged divinities and demons malignant rather than beneficent. 
Such are Boreas, Echidna, Typhon and the snake-tailed giants. 

In the design from a black-figured cylix^ in fig. 58 we have a 
curious and rare instance of beings of monstrous form, yet obviously 




Fifi. 58. 

beneficent. The scene is a vineyard at the time of vintage. On 
the reverse (not figured here) we have the same vintage-setting, 
but goats, the destroyers of the vine, are nibbling at the vine- 
stems. On the obverse (fig. 58) we have snake-bodied nymphs 
rejoicing in the grape harvest. Two of them hold a basket 
of net or wicker in which the grapes will be gathei-ed, a third 
holds a great cup for the vine-juice, a fourth plays on the 
double flutes. 



' P. vin. 42. 4. The material for the study of the non-human forms taken by 
Greek K'^ds has been recently collected by Dr M. W. de Visser, Die uiclit-mcn- 
8chen()i;Ht.iilti()en Gottei- der Griecheii, 190a. 

" P. VIII. 41. 6. 

•' Munich. Published and discussed by Dr Bohlan, ' Schlangenleibige Nyiiii)li(ii,' 
PhilolofiOH Lvii. N.F. XI. 1, and see 'Delp'hika,' JJf.S. xix. 1899, p. 21(5, note 1. 

17- 2 



260 The Making of a Goddess [ch. 

Unhappily we can give no certain name to these kindly grape- 
gathering, flute- playing snake-nymphs. They are 8paKovTU)8€L<i 
Kopai, but assuredly they are not Erinyes and we dare not even 
call them Eumenides. Probably any Athenian child would have 
named them without a moment's hesitation, but we must be 
content to say that, in their essence, they are Charites, givers 
of grace and increase, and that their snake-bodies mark them not 
as malevolent, but as earth-daemons, genii of fertility. They are 
near akin to the local Athenian hero, the snake-tailed Cecrops, 
and we are tempted to conjecture that in art, though not in 
literature, he may have lent his snake-tail to the Agraulid 
nymphs, his daughters. Later it will be seen that earth-born 
goddesses, though they shed their snake-form, keep as their 
vehicle and attribute the snake they once were. 



The Mother and the Maid. 

The gods reflect not only man's human form but also his 
human relations. In the Homeric Olympus we see mirrored a 
family group of the ordinary patriarchal type, a type so familiar 
that it scarcely arrests attention. Zeus, Father of Gods and men, 
is supreme ; Hera, though in constant and significant revolt, 
occupies the subordinate place of a wife ; Poseidon is a younger 
brother, and the rest of the Olympians are grouped about Zeus 
and Hera in the relation of sons and daughters. These sons and 
daughters are quarrelsome among themselves and in constant 
insurrection against father and mother, but still they constitute 
a family, and a family subject, if reluctantly, to the final authority 
of a father. 

But when we come to examine local cults we find that, if these 
mirror the civilization of the worshippers, this civilization is 
quite other than patriarchal. Hera, subject in the Homeric 
Olympus, reigns alone at Argos ; Athene at Athens is no god's 
wife, she is affiliated in some loose fashion to Poseidon, but the 
relation is one of rivalry and ultimate conquest, nowise of sub- 
ordination. At Eleusis two goddesses reign supreme, Demeter 
and Kore, the Mother and the Maid ; neither Hades nor Tripto- 
lemos their nursling ever disputes their sway. At Delphi in 



Yi] The Mother and the Maid 261 

historical days Apollo held the oracle, but Apollo, the priestess^ 
knows, was preceded by a succession of women goddesses : 

' First in my prayer before all other gods 
I call on Earth, primaeval prophetess. 
Next Themis on her mother's oi'aciilar seat 
Sat, so men say. Third 1»y unforced consent 
Another Titan, daughter too of Earth, 
Phoebe. She gave it as a birthday gift 
To Phoebus, and giving called it by her name.' 

Gaia the Earth was first, and elsewhere Aeschylus- tells us 
that Themis was but another name of Gaia. Prometheus says the 
future was foretold him by his mother : 

' Themis she 
And Gaia, one in form with many names.' 

In historical days in Greece, descent was for the most part 
traced through the father. These primitive goddesses reflect 
another condition of things, a relationship traced through the 
mother, the state of society known by the awkward term matri- 
archal ^ a state echoed in the lost Catalogues of Women, the 
Eoiai of Hesiod, and in the Boeotian heroines of the Nehuia. 
Our modern patriarchal society focusses its religious anthropo- 
morphism on the relationship of the father and the son ; the 
Roman Church with her wider humanity includes indeed the 
figure of the Mother who is both Mother and Maid, but she is 
still in some sense subordinate to the Father and the Son. 

Of the many survivals of matriarchal notions in Greek myth- 
ology one salient instance may be noted. S. Augustine'*, telling 
the story of the rivalry between Athene and Poseidon, says that 
the contest was decided by the vote of the citizens, both men and 
women, for it was the custom then for women to take part in 
public affairs. The men voted for Poseidon, the women for 
Athene ; the women exceeded the men by one and Athene prevailed. 
To appease the wrath of Poseidon the men inflicted on the women 
a triple punishment, ' they were to lose their vote, their children 
luere no longer to he called hy their mother's name and they 

' Aesch. Euvi. 1. - Aesch. Prom. Vinct. 209. 

■' The clearest and most scientific statement of the facts as to this diflicult 
subject known to me is to be found in an article by ])r E. B. Tylor, 'The Rlatii- 
arclifil family system,' Ninelcenth Century, July lH!)<j. 

■* S. Augustine, Dn civitat. Dei 18. 9 ut nulla ulterius ferrent sulfragia, ut 
nullus nascentium maternum nomeu acciperet, ut tu; (juis eas ,\thenaeas vocaret. 



262 The Jlaklng of a Goddess [ch. 

themselves were no longer to be called after their goddess, 
Athenians.' 

The myth is aetiological, and it mirrors surely some shift in 
the social organization of Athens. The citizens were summoned 
by Cecrops, and it is noticeable that with his name universal 
tradition associates the introduction of the patriarchal form of 
marriage. Athenaeus^ quoting from Clearchos, the pupil of 
Aristotle, says, ' At Athens Cecrops was the first to join one 
woman to one man : before connections had taken place at random 
and marriages were in common — hence, as some think, Cecrops 
was called " Twy-formed " (8t</>f 77?), since before his day people did 
not know who their fathers were, on account of the number 
(of possible parents).' A society that had passed to patriarchy 
naturally misjudged the marriage-laws of matriarchy and regarded 
it as a mere state of promiscuity. Cecrops, tradition- said, was 
the first to call Zeus the Highest, and with the worship of Zeus 
the Father it is possible that he introduced the social conditions 
of patriarchy. Apollo, the son of Zeus, was worshipped at Athens 
as Patroos. 

The primitive Greek was of course not conscious that he 
mirrored his own human relations in the figures of his gods, but, 
in the reflective days of Pythagoras, the analogy between human 
and divine was not left unnoted. The evidence he adduces as to 
the piety of women is perhaps the most illuminating comment on 
primitive theology ever made by ancient or modern. ' Women,' 
he^ says, 'give to each successive stage of their life the same 
name as a god, they call the unmarried woman Maiden {Kopr]), the 
woman given in marriage to a man Bride (Nvfi(f)r]), her who has 
borne children Mother (Mt^tt;^), and her who has borne children's 
children Grandmother (Mata).' Invert the statement and we have 
the whole matriarchal theology in a nutshell. The matriarchal 
goddesses reflect the life of women, not women the life of the 
goddesses. 

Of these various forms of the conditions of woman, woman as 
maiden, bride, mother and grandmother, the last, grandmother, 

1 Athen. xiii. 2 p. 5-5o and Tzetzes Chil. v. 19. 650. Other instances of the 
survival in Greek mythology of traces of matriarchal conditions are collected by 
Bachofen in his Miiiterrecht, a book which, spite of the wildness of its theories, 
remains of value as the fullest existing collection of ancient facts. 

- P. vm. 2. .3. 3 Diog. 8. 1. 10, and Iambi. Vit. Pyth. 3. 11. 



Yi] The Lady of the Wild Thinr/s 263 

comes little into prominence ; it only lends a name to Maia, the 
mother of Hermes. Nymphs we have everywhere, but the two 
cardinal conditions are obviously to a primitive society Mother' and 
Maiden. When these conditions crystallized into the goddess forms 
of Demeter and Kore, they appear as Mother and DaugJiter, but 
primarily the conditions expressed are Mother and Maid, woman 
mature and woman before maturity, and of these two forms the 
Mother-form as more characteristic is, in early days, the more 
prominent ; Kore as daughter rather than maiden is the product of 
mytholog}-. When we come to the religion of Dionysos, it will be 
seen that the Mother-goddess has for her attribute of motherhood 
a son rather than a daughter. 



The Earth-Mother as Karpophoros or Lady of the 

Wild Things. 

The Mother-goddess was almost necessarily envisaged as the 
Earth. The ancient Dove-priestesses at Dodona- were the first to 
chant the Litany : 

' Zeus was, Zeu.s is, Zeus shall be, great Zeus. 
Earth sends up fruits, so praise we Earth the Mother.' 

The tw^o lines have no necessary connection ; it may be 
that their order is inverted and that long before the Dove- 
priestesses sang the praises of Zeus they had chanted their hymn 
to the Mother. It was fitting that women priestesses should sing 
to a woman goddess, to Ga who was also Ma. Mother-Earth bore 
not only fruits but the race of man. As the poet Asius^ said : 

' Divine Pelasgo.s on the wood-clad hills 
Black Earth brought forth, that mortal man might be.' 

Pelasgos claimed no lather, but he, the first father, had a 
mother. And here it must be noted that the local mother must 
necessarily have preceded Gaia the abstract and uniwrsal. Primi- 

' Tlie fundamental unity of all the Greek goddesses was, I tliink, lir.st obscivnd 
by Gerhard, JJcher Matroon und Goetter-Mutter, 1849, p. lOH, but his iHumiuating 
BUgge.stion has been obscured for half a century by systems, sucJi as that of I'reller 
and Max Miiller, that see in ancient deities iniijcrsonatious of natural phenomena. 
'^ v. X. 12. 10 

Zfi'js 7]i>, /ei';s ^(TTt, Zeus idOirai' iL fitydXt ZeO. 
I'a KapTTovs duid, otb K\fi^eT€ fxrirljia ycuav. 
^ 1'. vni. '2. 4. 



264 



The Making of a Goddess 



[CH. 



tive man does not tend to deal in abstractions. Each local hero 
claimed descent from a local earth-nymph or mother^ Salamis, 
Aegina and ' dear mother Ida ' are not late geographical abstrac- 
tions ; each is a local mother, a real parent, and all are later merged 
in the great All-Mother Ge. 

The Earth-Mother and each and every local nymph was mother 
not only of man but of all 
creatures that live ; she is 
the 'Lady of the Wild 
Things ' {irorvLa drjpcov). 
Art brings her figure very 
clearly before us. On an 
early stamped Boeotian 
amphora- in the National 
Museum at Athens (figs. 
59 and 60) she is vividly 
presented. The Great 
Mother stands with up- 
lifted hands exactly in the 
attitude of the still earlier 
figures recently discovered 
in the Mycenaean shrine 
at Cnossos. To either side 
of her is a lion, heraldically 
posed like the lions of the 
Gate at Mycenae ; below 
her is a frieze of deer. 
The figure is supported or 
rather encircled by two 
women figures, one at 

either side. These seem to be part of a ring of encircling 
Avorshippers^. 




Fig. 59. 



1 The distinction has been acutely observed bj- Miss W. M. L. Hutchinson 
in discussing the earthborn parentage of Aeacus, see Aeacus a Judge of tlie 
Underworld, p. 6. 

- 'E(pr]/j.epis 'Apx- 1892, PI. 9 ; for stamped Boeotian amphorae in general, 
see Mr A. de Kidder, Bull, de Corr. Hell. xxii. 1898, p. 440. 

3 Dr Wolters ('Ecp. 'Apx- 1892, p. 225) explains the figure of the Earth-Mother 
as Artemis Aexti. I entirely agree with Prof. S. Wide that her i^ose is not that of 
' eine gebarende Frau ' : see S. Wide, ' Mykenische Giitterbilder und Idole,' A. Mitt. 
XXVI. 1901, p. 253. 



YI] 



The Lady of the Wild Things 



26; 



o 






-m.i^' 



■*^ttt»uf^<*!i^tmm^mmmmlk 




Fig. I'.n. 



The design iu fig. 61 from a painted Boeotian amphora^ also in 




I'll., ci. 



the Museum at Athens, shows a similai- and even more complete 
conception of the ' Lady of the Wild Things.' TT.t two lions still 

' 'K./.. 'Apx- 1B02, I'l. 1(1. 1. 



266 



The MaMng of a Goddess 



[CH. 



keep heraldic guard, above her outstretched arms are two birds\ 
her gown is decorated with the figure of a great fish. We are 
reminded of the Eurynome of Phigalia with her fish-tailed body. 

The interesting thing about these early representations, these 
and countless others, is that we can give the goddess no proper 
name. We call her rightly the Great Mother and the ' Lady of 
the Wild Things,' but farther we cannot go. She has been named 
Artemis and Cybele, but for neither name is there a particle of 
evidence. 

The Great Mother is mother of the dead as well as the living. 
The design in fig. 62 is from the interior of a rock-hewn tomb 



Ceiling 




Lijie. of Door 
Fig. 62. 



in Phrygia-. The great figure of the Mother and her lions occupies 
the whole height of the back wall of the tomb. ' All things,' 
as Cicero^ says, 'go back to earth and rise out of the earth,' 



1 On the head of one of the idols in the recently discovered shrine at Cnossos, 
Mr Arthur Evans kindly tells me, is perched a dove, a forecast it may be of 
AjDhrodite. 

3 See Prof. Eamsay, J.H.S. 1884, p. 245. 

■* Cic. De Nat. Dear. ii. 26 et recidunt omnia in terras et oriuntur e terris. 



vi] The Mother as Kourotrophos 267 

' Dust we are, and imto dust we shall return,' and more tenderly 
Aeschylus^ : 

'Yea, summon Earth, who brings all things to life 
And rears and takes again into her womb.' 

And so the Mother herself keeps ward in the metro^oW^ of the 
dead, and therefore ' the Athenians of old called the dead " Demeter's 
people " -.' On the festival day of the dead, the Nekusia at Athens, 
they sacrificed to Earth. To a people who j)ractised inhumation, 
such ritual and such symbolism were almost inevitable. When the 
Earth-Mother developed into the Corn-Mother, such symbolism 
gained new life and force from the processes of agriculture. 
Cicero^ records that in his day it was still the custom to sow 
the graves of the dead with corn : ' that which thou soAvest is not 
quickened except it die'*.' Out of the symbolism of the corn sown 
the Greeks did not develope a doctrine of immortality, but, when 
that doctrine came to them from without, the symbolism of the 
seed lay ready to hand. 



The Mother as Kourotrophos. 

Early art figures the Mother in quaint instructive fashion 
as Kourotrophos, the Child-Rearer. As such she appears in the 
design in fig. 63 taken from an early black-figured amphora of 
the 6th century B.C. in the British Museum l This figure of 
the Mother is usually explained as Leto with the twins Apollo 
and Artemis, but such an interpretation is, I think, over-bold, 
and really misleading. The artist knows that there is a Mother- 
Goddess; one child would be sufficient as an attribute of mother- 
hood, but in his quaint primitive fashion he wishes to emphasize 
her motherhood, he gives her all the children she can conveniently 
hold, one on each shoulder, 

1 Aesch. Choeph. 127. 

- Pint, tie fac. ill orb. Inn. 2S Kal tovs veKpovs 'A07)vaioi Arj/xrjTpelovi wvbfiai^ov to 
iraXaLov. 

» Cic. Leffff. II. 22, and 25, irs. ^ 1 Cor. xv. H(i. 

' B. M. Cat. B 213. Inghiraini, Vaai Fitt. m. 300. Mr A. Lan^,', Homeric 
Hymns, plate lacinK p. 104, names the desif,'n 'Leto with ber infants Apollo and 
Artemis.' The catalogue of the liritish Musemn with jnst caution says ' licto ('.'),' 
but adds that the children are ' probably Apollo and Artemis.' The fiKines to 
either side of the central 'Mother,' Dionysos and a Hatyr, give no clue to the 
interpretation. 



268 



The MaMng of a Goddess 



[CH. 



We have no right to name the children Apollo and Artemis, 
unless inscribed or marked as such by attributes. This is clear 
from the fact that, on a frag- 
ment of a vase found in the 
Acropolis excavations and un- 
happily still unpublished, we 
have a figure closely analo- 
gous, though later in style, to 
our Kourotrophos, bearing on 
her elbows two little naked 
imps ivho are inscribed : the 
one is Himei^os, the other 
^(ros). The mother can in 
this case be none other than 
Aphrodite. The attribution 
is confirmed by another frag- 
ment^ in which only half of 
the Mother-goddess is pre- 
served and one child seated 
on her elbow ; the child is 
not inscribed, but against the 
mother, in archaic letters, is 
written Aplirodi{te) ; near her 
as on our vase is standing 
Dionysos. 

Pausanias", when examin- 
ing the chest of Cypselos, saw a» design on which was represented 
' a woman carrying a white boy sleeping on her right arm ; on the 
other arm she has a black boy who is like the one who is asleep ; 
they both have their feet twisted {aix(^orepov<i Biearpa/LL/LLevov; 
Toi)? TToSaii) ; the inscriptions show that the bo3's are Death and 
Sleep, and that Night is the nurse of both.' He adds the rather 
surprising statement that it ' would have been easy to see who 
they were without the inscriptions.' 

A woman with a child on each arm can then represent 
Aphrodite with Himeros and Eros ; if one child is white and 

1 Mr G. C. Richards, J.H.S. xiii. 1892, p. 284, pi. xi. 

- P. V. 18. 1. Dr Frazer translates the difficult word SiecrTpa/j./j.ei'ovs ' turned 
different ways'; the word seems usually to imply distortion, but in the case of 
Death and Sleep this seems inappropriate. 




Fig. 63. 



Yi] The Mother as Kourotrojjhos 269 

asleep and the other black, the group represents Night with 
Death and Sleep ; if the group is to represent Leto and her 
twins, there must be something to mark the twins as Apollo 
and Artemis. On another amphora in the British Museum^ there 
does exist just the necessary differentiation : the child on the left 
arm is naked, the child on the right though also painted black 
wears a short chiton. We are justified in supposing that the one 
is a boy the other a girl, and there is at least a high probability 
that the differentiation of sex points to Apollo and Artemis. 

I have dwelt on this point because vase-paintings are here, as 
so often, highly instructive in the matter of the development and 
slow differentiation and articulation of theological types. At first 
all is vague and misty ; there is, as it were, a blank formula, a 
mother-goddess characterized by twins. If we give her a name at 
all she is Kourotrophos. As her personality grows she differ- 
entiates, she is Aphrodite with Eros and Himeros, she is Night 
Avith Sleep and Death. When Apollo and Artemis came from the 
North they became the twins par excellence, and they are aflfiliated 
to the old religion ; the Mother as Kourotrophos became Leto with 
Apollo and Artemis. 

The like process goes on in literature, though it is less obviously 
manifest. At the opening of the Thesmophoria the Woman-Herald 
in Aristophanes'- makes proclamation as follows : 

' Keep .solemn silence. Keep solemn silence. Pray to the two Thesmo- 
phoroi, to Demeter, and to Kore, and to Plouton, and to Kalligeneia, and to 
Kourotrophos, and to Hermes, and the Charites.' 

Discussion from the time of the scholiast onwards has raged 
as to who Kourotrophos is — is she Hestia, is she Ge ? The simple 
truth is never faced that she is Kourotrophos, an attribute become 
a personality. Her personality, it is true, faded before the dominant 
personality of the Mother of Eleusis, but her presence in the 
ancient ritual-formulary speaks clearly for her original actuality. 
Once she had faded, all the other more successful goddesses, Ge, 
Artemis, Hekate, Leto, Demeter, Aphrodite, even Athene, contend 
for her name as their epithet. There is no controversy so idle and 
apparently so prolific as that which seeks to find in these ancient 

' i;. M. Cat. I! 168. 

-' Ar. 'J'lifxm. '29o and scliol. acl Inc. The words rrj Vrj have been interpolated 
after KoviJOTf)6(j>u> but witlidul ms. authority. 



270 



The Making of a Goddess 



[CH. 



^rA9H 

/T^XHMHAOK^ 



inchoate personalities, such as Kourotrophos and Kalligeneia, the 
epithets of the Olympians they so long predated. 

The figure of the Mother as Kourotrophos lent itself easily to 
later abstractions. Themis is one of the earliest, and she attains 
a real personality ; her sisters Eunomia and Dike are scarcely flesh 
and blood, they are beautiful stately shadows. The ' making of a 
goddess' is always a mystery, the outcome of manifold causes of 
which we have lost count. At the close of the 5th century B.C. at 
the end of the weary, fatal Peloponnesian war, Eirene, Peace, almost 
attained godhead, and godhead as the Mother. Cephisodotos, father 
of Praxiteles, made for the market-place at Athens a statue of her 
carrying the child Ploutos, the 
Athenians built her an altar 
and did sacrifice to her, Aristo- 
phanes brings her on the stage, 
but it is all too late and in vain, 
she remains an abstraction as 
lifeless as Theoria or Opora, 
and finds no place among the 
humanities of Olympus. 

Tyche, Fortune, another late 
abstraction of the Mother, 
though she is scarcely more 
human than Eirene, obtained a 
wide popularity. Pausanias^ 
saw at Thebes a sanctuarj' of 
Tyche ; he remarks after naming 
the artists, ' it was a clever 
plan of them to put Ploutos in 
the arms of Tyche as his mother 
or nurse, and Cephisodotos was 
no less clever ; he made for the 
Athenians the image of Eirene holding Ploutos.' 

These abstractions, Tyche, Ananke and the like, were popular 
with the Orphics. Theii* very lack of personality favoured a 
growing philosophic monotheism. The design in fig. 64 is carved 
in low relief on one of the columns of the Hall of the Mj^stae of 




Fig. 64. 



1 P. IX. 16. 2. 



vi] Demeter and Kore 271 

Dionysos, recently excavated at Melos\ Tyche holds a child — 
presumably the local Ploutos of Melos — in her arms. Above her 
is inscribed, ' May Agathe Tyche of Melos be gracious to 
Alexandros, the founder of the holy Mystae.' Tyche, Fortune, 
might be, to the uninitiated, the Patron, the Good Luck of any 
and every city, but to the mystic she had another and a deeper 
meaning ; she, like the Agathos Daimon, was the inner Fate of his 
life and soul. In her house, as will later be seen (Chap, xi.), he 
lodged, observing rules of purity and abstinence before he was 
initiated into the underworld mysteries of Trophonios, before he 
drank of the waters of Lethe and Mnemosyne. It is one of the 
countless instances in which the Orphics went back behind the 
Olympian divinities and mysticized the earlier figures of the 
Mother or the Daughter. 

Demeter and Kore. 

So long as and wherever man lived for the most part by 
hunting, the figure of the ' Lady of the Wild Things ' would 
content his imagination. But, when he became an agriculturist, 
the Mother-goddess must perforce be, not only Kourotrophos of all 
living things, but also the Corn-mother, Demeter. 

The derivation of the name Demeter has been often discussed-. 
The most popular etymology is that which makes her AafMy^rrjp, 
Earth-mother, Aa, which occurs in such interjections-' as cfyev Sa, 
olol 8d, being regarded as the equivalent of Fa. From the point 
of view of meaning this etymology is nowise satisfactorN^ 
Demeter is not the Earth-Mother, not the goddess of the earth in 
general, but of the fruits of the civilized, cultured earth, the tilth ; 
not the 'Lady of the Wild Things,' but She-who-bears-fruits, 
Karpop/ioros. Mannhardt was the first to point out another 
etymology, more consonant with this notion. The author of the 

1 Mr R. C. Bosanquct, 'Excavations of the British School at Melos,' J.TI.S. xviii. 
IB'.W, i>. (iO, Fig. 1, and Dr P. Welters, ' Melische Kultstatuen,' .1. Mitt. xv. 1890, 
p. 248. 

^ All the proposed etymologies, possible and impossible, are collected by 
Mannhardt, Mytholoijinche Forschimgen, p. 287. To his discussion must now be 
added Dr Kretschmer's view that AS. like Ma means mother and that the form 
Aa/xdrr/p arose when Ad had crystallized into a proper name. See Fctsturhrift dcr 
Wiener-Studien, 1902, p. 291. 

* Aesch. Prom. Vlnct. 508. 



272 The Mciking of a Goddess [ch. 

Etymologicon Magnum^, after stringing together a whole series of 
senseless conjectures, at last stumbles on what looks like the truth. 
' Deo,' he says, ' may be derived from Td<; Stjci'?, for barley grains 
are called by the Cretans SrjaL' The Cretan word Brjat is near 
akin to the ordinary Greek ^€td, the word used for a coarse wheat 
or spelt; the fruitful field in Homer'- bears the epithet ^elScopo'i, 
' spelt-yielding.' Demeter, it will later be seen (p. 564), probably 
came from Crete, and brought her name with her ; she is the 
Earth, but onl}^ in this limited sense, as ' Grain-Mother.' 

To the modern mind it is surprising to find the processes of 
agriculture conducted in the main by women, and mirroring them- 
selves in the figures of women-goddesses. But in days when man 
was mainly concerned with hunting and fighting it was natural 
enough that agriculture and the ritual attendant on it should fall 
to the women. Moreover to this social necessity was added, and still 
is among many savage communities, a deep-seated element of super- 
stition. ' Primitive man,' Mr Payne^ observes, ' refuses to interfere 
in agriculture ; he thinks it magically dependent for success on 
woman, and connected with child-bearing.' ' When the women 
plant maize,' said the Indian to Gumilla, ' the stalk produces two 
or three ears. Why ? Because women know how to produce 
children. They only know how to plant corn to ensure its germi- 
nating. Then let them plant it, they know more than we know.' 
Such seems to have been the mind of the men of Athens who sent 
their wives and daughters to keep the Thesmophoria and work 
their charms and ensure fertility for crops and man. 

It was mainly in connection with agriculture, it would seem, 
that the Earth-goddess developed her double form as Mother 
and Maid. The ancient ' Lady of the Wild Things ' is both in one 
or perhaps not consciously either, but at Eleusis the two figures 
are clearly outlined ; Demeter and Kore are two persons though 
one god. They take shape very charmingly in the design in 
fig. Go, from an early red-figured skyphos'', found at Eleusis. To 
the left Demeter stands, holding in her left hand her sceptre, 
while with her right she gives the corn-ears to her nursling, 

^ Etym. Mag. s.v. Srjii sub fin. : ^ Atjw, wapa rets or^cts • ovtu yap S-rjal Trpoaayopeij- 
ovrai i'TTo KprjTiov ai KpiOai. 

• Horn. 11. II. 528 I'eidupos apovpa. 

^ History of the New World, vol. ii. p. 7. 

^ 0. Rubensohn, ' Eleusiniscbe Beitriige,' A. Mitth. 1899, pi. vii. 



YI] 



Demeter ami Kore 



'2T^ 



Triptolemos, who holds his ' crooked plough.' Behmd is Kore, 
the maiden, with her simf)le chiton for dress, and her long flowing 




Fig. 65. 



hair, and the torches she holds as Queen of the underworld. Mother 
and Maid in this picture are clearly distinguished, but not infre- 
quently, when both appear together, it is impossible to say which 
is which. 



The relation of these early matriarchal, husbandless goddesses, 
whether Mother or Maid, to the male figures that accompany them 
is one altogether noble and womanly, though perhaps not what 
the modern mind holds to be feminine. It seems to halt some- 
where half-way between Mother and Lover, with a touch of the 
patron saint. Aloof from achievement themselves, they choose a 
local hero for their own to inspire and protect. They ask of him, 
not that he should love or adore, but that he should do great deeds. 
Hera has Jason, Athene Perseus, Herakles and Theseus, Demeter 
and Kore Triptolemos. And as their glory is in the hero's high 
deeds, so their grace is his guerdon. With tiic coming of patriarchal 
conditions this high companionship ends. The women goddesses 
are sequestered to a servile domesticity, they become abject and 
amorous. 



H. 



18 



274 The Making of a Goddess [ch. 

It is important to note that primarily the two forms of the 
Earth or Corn-goddess are not Mother and DaugJiter. but Mother 
and Maiden, Demeter and Kore. They are, in fact, merely the 
older and younger form of the same person ; hence their easy con- 
fusion. The figures of the Mother and Daughter are mythological 
rather than theological, i.e. they arise from the story -telling 
instinct : 

' Demeter of the beauteous hair, goddess divine, I sing, 
She and the slender-ancled maid, her daughter, whom the king 
Aidoneus seized, by Zeus' decree. He found her, as she jjlayed 
Far from her mother's side, who reaps the corn with golden blade i.' 

The corn is reaped and the earth desolate in winter-time. 
Aetiology is ready with a human love-story. The maiden, the 
young fruit of the earth, was caught by a lover, kept for a season, 
and in the spring-time returns to her mother; the mother is com- 
forted, and the earth blossoms again" : 

' Thus she spake, and then did Demeter the garlanded yield 
And straightway let spring up the fruit of the loamy tield. 
And all the breadth of the earth, with leaves and blossoming things 
Was heavy. Then she went forth to the law-delivering kings 
And taught them, Triptolemos first.' 

Mythology might work its will, but primitive art never clearly 
distinguished between the Mother and the Maid, never lost hold 
of the truth that they were one goddess. On the Boeotian plate^ 
in fig. 66 is figured the Corn-goddess, but whether as Mother or 
Maid it is difficult, I incline to think impossible, to decide. She 
is a great goddess, enthroned and heavily draped, wearing a high 
polos on her head. She holds ears of corn, a pomegranate, a torch ; 
before her is an omphalos-like altar, on it what looks like a pome- 
granate — is she Demeter or Persephone ? I incline to think she 
is both in one ; the artist has not differentiated her. 



^ Horn. Hymn, ad Cer. 1. 

2 Horn. Hymn, ad Cer. 470. The elaborate aetiology of the whole Homeric 
Hymn to Demeter has been fully examined and explained by Mr F. B. Jevons in 
his Introduction to the History of Ileliyion, ch. xxiii. and Appendix. 

* Athens Nat. Mus. 484. Fig. 66 is reproduced from a photograph kindly sent 
me by Prof. Sam. Wide. For further particulars of this class of vases I must refer 
to Prof. Wide's article ' Eine lokale Gattung Boiotischer Gefasse," A. Mitt. xxvi. 1901, 
p. 143. Prof. Wide makes the interesting suggestion that the bird in the field is 
a bird-soul and points out that merely decorative 'Fiillfiguren' do not occur on this 
class of vases. This interpretation seems to me highly probable, but till further 
evidence emerges, I hesitate to adopt it as certain. 



VI] 



Demeter and Kore 



275 



The dead, according to Plutarch's^ statement, were called by 
the Athenians ' Demeter's people.' The ancient ' Lady of the Wild 




Fig. 66. 



Things,' with her guardian lions, keeps ward over the dead in the 
tombs of Asia Minor, and every grave became her sanctuary. But 
in Greece proper, and especially at Eleusis, where the Mother and 
the Maid take mythological, differentiated form as Demeter and 
her daughter Persephone, their individual functions tend more and 
more to specialize. Demeter becomes more and more agricultural, 
more and more the actual corn. As Plutarch- observes — with full 
consciousness of the anomalous blend of the human and the 
physical — a poet can say of the reapers : 

'What time men shear to earth Demeter'.s limbs.' 

The Mother takes the physical side, the Daughter the spiritual 
— the Mother is more and more of the upper air, the Daughter of 
the underworld. 

Demeter as Thesmophoros has for her sphere more and 
more the things of this life, laws and civilized marriage; she 
grows more and more human and kindly, goes more and more 

^ Plut. de far,, in orb. lun. xxvin. 

- I'hit. de Ik. et Oair. lxvi. woirjTrjs 5i ris iiri tCjv Otpi^dvTwv 'Tij/io? 6t' ai(;i}ol 
J^i^fj.7jrepa KuXorofji.eiJcni'.^ 

18—2 



276 The Making of a Goddess [ch. 

over to the humane Olympians, till in the Homeric Hymn she, the 
Earth-Mother, is an actual denizen of Olympus. The Daughter, 
at first but the young form of the mother, is in maiden fashion 
sequestered, even a little farouche ; she withdraws herself more 
and more to the kingdom of the spirit, the things below and 

beyond : 

'She waits for each and other, 

She waits for all men born, 
Forgets the earth her mother, 

The life of fruits and corn. 
And spring and seed and swallow 
Take wing for her and follow 
Where summer song rings hollow 

And flowers are j)ut to scorn.' 

And in that kingdom aloof her figure waxes as the figure of 
the Mother wanes : 

' daughter of earth, my mother, her crown and blossom of birth, 
I am also I also thy brother, I go as I came unto earth.' 

She passes to a place unknown of the Olympians, her kingdom 
is not of this world. 

' Thou art more than the Gods, who number the days of our temporal breath, 
For these give labour and slumber, but thou, Proserpina, Death.' 

All this is matter of late development. At first we have 
merely the figures of the Two Goddesses, the Two Thesmophoroi, 
the Two Despoinae. Demeter at Hermione is Chthonia, in 
Arcadia' she is at once Erinys and Lousia. But it is not sur- 
prising that, as will later be seen, a religion like Orphism, which 
concerned itself with the abnegation of this world and the life of 
the soul hereafter, laid hold rather of the figure of the underworld 
Kore, and left the prosperous, genial Corn-Mother to make her 
way alone into Olympus. 



The Anodos of the Maiden Earth-goddesses. 

In discussing the Boeotian plate (fig. QQ), it has been seen 
that it is not easy always to distinguish in art the figures of the 
Mother and the Maid. A like difficulty attends the interpretation 
of the series of curious representations of the earth-goddess now 
to be considered (figs. 67 — 71). 

1 P. VIII. 25. 4—7. 



VI] 



The Anodos of the 31aiden 



277 



We begin with the vase-painting in fig. 67, where happily an 
inscription makes the interpretation certain. The design is from 
a red-figured krater, now in the Albertinum Museum at Dresden \ 
To the right is a conventional earth-mound (%&>/*« 77/<?). In front 




Fig. G7. 



of it stands Hermes. He holds not his kerykeion, but a rude 
forked rhabdos. It was with the rhabdos, it will be remembered 
(p. 44), that he summoned the souls from the grSiye-pitJtos. 
Here, too, he is present as Psychagogos ; he has come to summon 
an earth-spirit, nay more, the Earth-goddess herself. Out of the 
artificial mound, which symbolizes the earth itself, rises the figure 
of a woman. At first sisfht we mi<jht be iru'lincd to call her Ge, 
the Earth-il/oi/ter, but the figure is slight aud maidenly, and over 
her happily is written (Phe)rophatta. It is the Anodos of Kore — 
the corning of the goddess is greeted by an ecstatic dance of g(;at- 

' Jalirhurh d. lust. Am. 1893, p. IfiO. 



278 



The Making of a Goddess 



[CH. 



horned Panes. They are not Satyrs : these, as will later be seen 
(p. 379), are horse demons. By the early middle of the 5th 
century B.C., the date of this red-figured vase, the worship of the 
Arcadian Pan was well-established at Athens, and the goat-men, 
the Panes, became the fashionable and fitting attendants of the 
Earth-Maiden. The inscriptions above their heads can, unfortu- 
nately, not be read. 

A vase of much later date (tig. 68) shows us substantially the 




Fig. 68. 

same scene. The design is from a red-figured krater^ in the 
Berlin Antiquarium. The goddess again rises from an artificial 
mound decorated with sprays of foliage. The attendant figures 
are different. A goat-legged Pan leans eagerly over the mound, 
but Dionysos himself, with his thyrsos, sits quietly waiting the 
Anodos, and with him are his real attendants, the horse-tailed 
Satyrs. In the left-hand corner a little winged Love-god plays on 
the double flutes. The rising goddess is not inscribed, and she is 

^ Berl. Cat. 2646. 2Ion. d. Inst. xii. tav. iv. This vase with others of the same 
type is exjjlained by Dr Robert, Archil ologische 2Iahrchei>, p. 196, as the rising of 
a Spring-Nymph, but the inscribed Berlin vase was not known to him, see also 
' Delphika,' -J.H.S. xix. 1899, p. 232. 



VI] 



The Anodos of the Maiden 



279 



best left unnamed. She is an Earth-goddess, but the presence of 
Dionysos makes us suspect that there is some reminiscence of 
Semele (p. 406). The presence of the Love-god points, as will be 
explained later (Chap, xil.), to the influence of Orphism. 

More curious, more instructive, but harder completely to 
explain, is the design in fig. 69, from a black-figured lekythos in 




i-IG. G'J. 



the Bibliotheque Nationale^ at Paris. The colossal head and 
lifted hands of a woman are rising out of the earth. This time 
there is no artificial mound, the scene takes place in a temple or 
sanctuary, indicated by the two bounding columns. Two men, not 
Satyrs, are present, and this time not as idle spectators. Both are 
armed with great mallets or hammers, and one of them strikes the 
head of the rising woman. 

Some possible light is thrown on this diflficult vase by the con- 
sideration of two others. First we have two designs from the 
obverse and reverse of an amphora-, shown together in fig. 70. 

' Cat. 298. Milliet et Giraudon, I'l. lii. v., discussed by Prof. Fartwiinfjler, 
Jahrhuch d. Inxt. ISlU, p. li;j, and Prof. Gardner, J.If.S.'wi. 1001, p. 5, and 
J. E. Harrison, 'Delphika,' J. U.S. xix. IHiiK, p. 2H2. 

2 Vasi dipinti del Museo Vivenzio designati di C. Angelini nel jidccxcvi. 
Illustrate di G. Patroni 11)00, Tav. xxix. All the plates of thia publication are 
of course reproduced from very old drawings and are quite untrustworthy as regards 
style. The vase under discussion is now lost, S(j that the original cannot be 
compared. Sig. Patroni thinks the drawing is authentic. 1 reproduce it jjartly 
because the subject is not wlioiiy expHcable, partly in the hoj)e that by nniking 
it more widely known, I may load to the rediscovery of the vase, which may be in 
some private collection. 



280 



The Making of ci Goddess 



[CH. 



On the obverse to the left we have a scene fairly familiar, a 
goddess rising from the ground, watched by a youth, who holds in 
his hand some sort of implement, either a pick or a hammer. 




Fig. 70. 

The meaning of the reverse design is conjectural. A man, short 
of stature and almost deformed in appearance, looks at a curious 
and problematic figure, half woman and half vase, set on a 
quadrangular basis. Before it, if the drawing be correct, is a 
spiked crown ; round about, in the field, a number of rosettes. A 
design so problematic is not likely to be a forgery. Before its 
meaning is conjectured, another vase, whose interpretation is 
perfectly clear and certain, remains to be considered. Its meaning 
may serve to elucidate the others. 

The design in fig. 71 is from a red-figured amphora^ of the 
finest period, in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. At a first 
glance, when we see the splendid figure rising from the ground 
with outstretched arms, the man with the hammer and Hermes 
attendant, we think that we have the familiar scene of the rising 
of Kore or Ge. As such, had no inscriptions existed, the design 
would certainly have been interpreted. But, as it happens, each 
figure is carefully inscribed. To the left Zeus, next to him 
Hermes, next EjnmetJieus, and last, not Ge or Kore, but Pandora. 
Over Pandora, to greet her upiising, hovers a Love-god with 
a fillet in his outstretched hands. 



1 Prof. Percy Gardner, 'A new Pandora Yase,' J.H.S. xxi. 1901, Plate 1. 



yi] 



The Anodos of the Maiden 



281 



Pandora rises from the earth ; she is the Earth, giver of all gifts. 
This is made doubly sure by another representation of her birth 
or rather her making. On the well-known ^a/e-cylix of the 



\m^^^^MmMmm 




Fm. 71. 



British Museum' Pandora, half statue half woman, has just been 
modelled by Hephaistos, and Athene is in the act of decking her. 
Pandora she certainly is, but against her is written her other name 
(A)nesidora-, ' she who sends up gifts.' Pandoia is a form or title 
of the Earth-goddess in the Kore form, entirely humanized and 
vividly personified by mythology. 

In the light of tliis substantial identity of Panduia and the 
Earth-Korc, it is possible perhaps to ofi'.T an explanation of the 

' lirit. Mm. Cat. 1> 4. White AtJwitian J'd.scs, Plate 1',). Mijth. and Man. a/ 
Aiic. Athens, p. 450, fig. oO. 

■•^ Tlie worsliip of G(; as Ancsidora at Plilya will bo later discussed, Cliap. xii. 



282 The Maldng of a Goddess [ch. 

problematic vase iu fig. 70. Have we not on obverse and reverse 
a juxtaposition of the two scenes, tlie Kise of Kore, the Making of 
Pandora ? On this showing the short deformed man would be 
Hephaistos, and Pandora, half woman half vase, may be conceived 
as issuing from her once famous pithos. 

The contamiyiatio of the myths of the Making of Pandora and 
the Anodes of Kore may explain also another difficulty. In the 
making and moulding of Pandora, Hephaistos the craftsman uses 
his characteristic implement, the hammer\ This hammer he also 
uses to break open the head of Zeus, in representations of the 
birth of Athene (p. 365). On vases with the Anodos of Kore 
the Satyrs or Panes carry and use sometimes an ordinary pick, 
sometimes a hammer, like the hammer of Hephaistos. The pick 
is the natural implement for breaking clods of earth, the spade 
appears to have been unknown before the iron age — the hammers 
have always presented a difficulty. May they not have arisen in 
connection with the myth of the making of Pandora, and then, by 
confusion, passed to the Anodos of Kore ? 

Finally, returning to the difficult design in fig. 69, I would 
offer another suggestion. The fact that the scene takes place in a 
sanctuary seems to me to indicate that we have here a representa- 
tion of some sort of mimetic ritual. The Anodos of Kore was, as 
has already been seen (p. 131), dramatized at certain festivals; 
exactly how we do not know^ At the festival of the Charila 
(p. 107) a puppet dressed as a girl was brought out, beaten, and 
ultimately hanged in a chasm. Is it not possible that at some 
festival of the Earth-goddess there was a mimetic enactment of 
the Anodos, that the earth or some artificially-formed chasm was 
broken open by picks, and that a puppet or a real woman emerged. 
It is more likely, I think, that the vase-painter had some such 
scene in his mind than that the Satyrs with their picks or 
hammers represent the storm and liglitning from heaven beating 
on the earth to subdue it and compel its fertility-. At Megara, 

1 A lost play of Sophocles was called Hai'Swpa ?) "S^rpvpoKoiroi. The ccpvpa though 
characteristic of Hephaistos the craftsman was used bj' agriculturists. Trygaeus in 
the Pax {v. 566) remembers that his a<j)dpa waits at home glittering and ready, 
see J.H.S. xx. 1900, p. 107. 

- Prof. Furtwangler, Jahrhuch d. Inst. 1891, pp. 117 and 124, 'Eiii uraltes 
mythisches Symbol fiir die Blitze sirid aber Hammer und Beil. Sie sind es...die 
mit miichtigen Gewittern den Kopf der grossen Mutter Erde schlagen und hiimmern 
bis sie erwacht und erweicht.' 



vi] Pandora 283 

near the Prytaneion, Pausanias^ saw ' a rock which was called 
Aiiaklethra-, " Calling Up," because Demeter, if anj^one like to 
believe it, when she was wandering in search of her daughter, 
called her up there.' He adds, ' the women of Megara to this day 
perform rites that are analogous to the legend told.' Unhappily 
he does not tell us what these rites were. Lucian devotes a half- 
serious treatise to discussing the scope and merits of pantomimic 
dancing, Xenophon-^ in his Banquet lets us see that educated 
guests after dinner preferred the acting of a myth to the tumbling 
of a dancing girl, but the actual ritual pantomime of the ancients 
is to us a sealed book. Of one thing we may be sure, that the 
' things done ' (Spcofieva) of ritual helped to intensify mythological 
impersonation as much as, or perhaps more than, the ' things 
spoken ' (eV?;) of the poet. 

Pandora. 

To the primitive matriarchal Greek Pandora was then a real 
goddess, in form and name, of the Earth, and men did sacrifice 
to her. By the time of Aristophanes^ she had become a misty 
figure, her ritual archaic — matter for the oracles of ' Bakis.' The 
prophet instructing Peisthetairos reads from his script : 
'First to Pandora sacrifice a white-fleeced ram.' 

The scholiast gives the correct and canonical interpretation 
' to Pandora, the earth, because she bestows all things necessary 
for life.' By his time, and long before, explanation was necessary. 
Hijiponax'^ know of her; Athenaeus, in his discussion of cabbages, 
quotes from memory the mysterious lines : 

'He gro\-elled, worshipping the seven-leaved cabbage 
To which Pandora sacrificed a cake 
At the Thargeha for a pharmalcos.' 

The passage, though obscure, is of interest because it connects 
Pandora the Earth-goddess with the Thargelia, the festival of the 

' P. I. 43. 2...ioiK6Ta ok ti^ \6ytf} opuiaiv is rj/xd'i ^ti ai 'Sleyapiwv yvvaiKes. 

- The Klymolofjicon Mafinnin has tlie form ' AvaKk-qOpis. 

^ Xen. Symp. vii. .5. I liave elHowliure (Mi/lli. and Mon. of Anc. Atlteux, p. cxvii) 
discuHHcd the possihle influoncc of nuch niiinctic prcsontatioiiH on thr lixud inytho- 
lo^icHl types of vase-paintings. Dr Fra/er ((joldm Jldiuih, 2nd ed. vol. m. j). Kio) 
inakrs the interesting suggestion that in sacred draiims may lie found a jjossibio 
meeting-ground between Euhemerists and their opponents. 

* Ar. Av. 971, schol. ad loc. ^' Frg. Hippon. a)>. Alhen. ix. tj ■<70. 



284 The Maling of a Goddess [ch. 

first-fruits of the Earth. Effaced in popular ritual she emerges in 
private superstition. Philostratos^, in his Life of Apollonius, tells 
how a certain man, in need of money to dower his daughter, 
' sacrificed ' to Earth for treasure, and Apollonius, to whom he 
confided his desire, said, ' Earth and I will help you,' and he 
prayed to Pandora, sought in a garden, and found the desired 
treasure. 

Pandora is in ritual and matriarchal theology the earth as 
Kore, but in the patriarchal mythology of Hesiod her great figure 
is strangely changed and minished. She is no longer Earth-born, 
but the creature, the handiwork of Olympian Zeus. On a late, 
red-figured krater in the British Museum-, obviously inspired by 
Hesiod, we have the scene of her birth. She no longer rises half- 
way from the ground, but stands stiff and erect in the midst of the 
Olympians. Zeus is there seated with sceptre and thunderbolt, 
Poseidon is there. Iris and Hermes and Ares and Hera, and Athene 
about to crown the new-born maiden. Earth is all but forgotten, 
and yet so haunting is tradition that, in a lower row, beneath the 
Olympians, a chorus of men, disguised as goat-horned Panes, still 
dance their welcome. It is a singular reminiscence, and, save as 
a survival, wholly irrelevant. 

Hesiod loves the story of the Making of Pandora : he has 
shaped it to his own houi^geois, pessimistic ends ; he tells it twice. 
Once in the Theogony^', and here the new-born maiden has no 
name, she is just a ' beautiful evil,' a ' crafty snare ' to mortals. 
But in the Works and Days^ he dares to name her and yet with 
infinite skill to wrest her glory into shame : 

' He spake, and they did the will of Zeus, son of Kronos, the Lord, 
For straightwaj" the Halting One, the Famous, at his word 
Took clay and moulded an image, in form of a maiden fair. 
And Athene, the gray-eyed goddess girt her and decked her hair. 
And about her the Graces divine and our Lady Persuasion set 
Bracelets of gold on her flesh ; and about her others yet, 
The Hours with their beautiful hair, twined wreaths of blossoms of spring, 
While Pallas Athene still ordered her decking in everything. 
Then put the Argus-slayer, the marshal of souls to their place. 
Tricks and flattering words in her bosom and thievish ways. 

1 Philostr. Tit. Apoll. xxxix. § 275. 

- Brit. Mus. Cat. E 467. J.H.S. xi. pi. 11 and 12, p. 278, and Eoscher, Lex. 
s.v. Pandora, fig. 2. 

a Hes. Theog. 570, trans. Mr D. S. MacCoU. 
■i Hes. Oj}. 69 ff. 



vi] Pandora 285 

He wrought by the will of Zeus, the Loud-thundering giving her voice, 
Spokesman of gods that he is, and for name of her thi's was his choice. 
Pandora, because in Olj'uipus the gods joined together then 
And all of them gave her, a gift, a sorrow, to covetous men.' 

Through all the magic of a poet, caught and enchanted himself 
by the vision of a lovely woman, there gleams the ugly malice of 
theological animus. Zeus the Father will have no great Earth- 
goddess, Mother and Maid in one, in his man-fashioned Olympus, 
but her figure is from the beginning, so he re-makes it ; woman, who 
was the inspirer, becomes the temptress; she who made all things, 
gods and mortals alike, is become their plaything, their slave, 
dowered only with physical beauty, and with a slave's tricks and 
blandishments. To Zeus, the archpatriarchal bourr/eois, the birth 
of the first woman is but a huge Olympian jest' : 

'He spake and the Sire of men and of gods immortal laughed.' 

Such myths are a necessary outcome of the shift from matri- 
archy to jDatriarchy, and the shift itself, spite of a seeming 
retrogression, is a necessary stage in a real advance. Matriarchy 
gave to women a false because a magical prestige. With patri- 
archy came inevitably the facing of a real fact, the fact of the 
gi-eater natural weakness of women. Man the stronger, when 
he outgi-ew his belief in the magical potency of woman, pro- 
ceeded by a pardonable practical logic to despise and enslave her 
as the weaker. The future held indeed a time when the non- 
natural, mystical truth came to be apprehended, that the stronger 
had a need, real and imperative, of the weaker. Physically nature 
had from the outset compelled a certain recognition of this truth, 
but that the physical was a sacrament of the spiritual was a hard 
saying, and its understanding was not granted to the Greek, save 
here and there where a flicker of the truth gleamed and went 
through the vision of philosopher or poet. 

80 the great figure of the Earth-goddess, Pandora, sufi'ered 
eclipse : she sank to be a beautiful, curious woman ; she opened 
her great gra,v e-pithos'-, she that was Mother of Life ; the Keres 
fluttered forth, bringing death and disease ; — only Hope remained. 
Strangely enough, when the great figure of the Earth- Mother 
re-emerges, she re-emerges, it will later be seen, as Aphrodite. 

' HcB. Op. o'J. - For the origin of the pithos see J. U.S. xx. I'JOO, p. !)'.). 



286 The 3IaMng of a Goddess [ch. 



The Maiden-Trinities. 

So far we have seen that a goddess, to the primitive Greek, 
took twofold form, and this twofold form, shifting and easily 
interchangeable, is seen to resolve itself very simply into the two 
stages of a woman's life, as Maiden and Mother. But Greek 
religion has besides the twofold Mother and Maiden a number of 
triple forms, Women-Trinities, which at first sight are not so 
readily explicable. We find not only three Gorgons and three 
Graiae, but three Semnae, three Moirae, three Charites, three 
Horae, three Agraulids, and, as a multiple of three, nine Muses. 

First it should be noted that the trinity-form is confined to the 
women goddesses. Greek religion had in Zeus and Apollo the 
figures of the father and the son, but of a male trinity we find no 
trace. Zeus and Apollo, incomers from the North, stand alone in 
this matter of relationship. We do not find the fatherhood of 
Poseidon emphasized, nor the sonship of Hermes ; there is no wide 
and universal development of the father and the son as there was 
of the Mother and the Maiden. Dualities and trinities alike seem 
to be characteristic of the old matriarchal goddesses. 

Evidence is not lacking that the trinity-form grew out of the 
duality. Plutarch^ notes as one of the puzzling things at Delphi 
Avhich required looking into, that two Moirae were worshipped there, 
whereas everywhere else three were canonical. It has already 
been seen (p. 242) that the number of the Semnae varied between 
two and three, and that, as three was the ultimate canonical 
number, we might fairly suppose the number two to have been 
the earlier. It is the same with the Charites. Pausanias- was 
told in Boeotia that Eteocles not only was ' the first who sacrificed 
to the Charites,' but, further, he 'instituted three Charites.' The 
names Eteocles gave to his three Charites the Boeotians did not 
remember. This is unfortunate, as Orchomenos was the most 
ancient seat of the worship of the Charites; their images there 
were natural stones that fell to Eteocles from heaven. Pausanias 
goes on to note that ' among the Lacedaemonians two Charites only 
were worshipped ; their names were Kleta and Phaenna. The 
Athenians also from ancient days worshipped two Charites, by 

1 Plut. de Ei ap. Delph. ii. 1. 2 p_ j^. aS. 1. 



Yi] The Maiden-Trinities 287 

name Auxo and Hegemone.' Later it appears they fell in with 
the prevailing fashion, for ' in front of the entrance to the Acropolis 
there were set up the images of three Charites.' The ancient 
Charites at Orchomenos, at Sparta, at Athens, were two, and it 
may be conjectured that they took form as the Mother and the 
Maid. 

The three daughters of Cecrops^ are by the time of Euripides 
' maidens threefold ' ; the three daughters of Erechtheus-, who are 
but their later doubles, are a ' trijale yoke of maidens,' and yet — in 
the case of the daughters of Cecrops — there is ample evidence^ that 
originally the}- were two, and these two probably a mother and 
a maid. Aglauros and Pandrosos are definite personalities ; they 
had regular precincts and shrines, knowni in historical times, 
Aglauros on the north slope of the Acropolis^ where the maidens 
danced, Pandrosos to the west of the Erechtheion^ But of a 
shrine, precinct, or sanctuary of Herse we have no notice. Ovid® 
probably felt the difficulty ; he lodges Herse in a chamber midway 
between Aglauros and Pandrosos. The women of Athens swore by 
Aglauros and more rarely by Pandrosos^. Aglauros, by whom 
they swore most frequently, and who gave her name to the 
Agraulids, was probably the earlier and mother-form. Herse was 
no good even to swear by ; she is the mere senseless etymological 
eponym of the festival of the Hersephoria, a third sister added to 
make up the canonical triad. The Hersephoria out of which she 
is made was not in her honour ; it was celebrated to Athene, to 
Pandrosos, to Ge, to Themis, to Eileithyia. 

The women-trinities rose out of dualities, but not every duality 
became a trinity. Plutarch**, in discussing the origin of the nine 
Muses, notes that we have not three Demeters, or three Athenes, 
or three Artemises. He touches unconsciously on the reason why 
some dualities resisted the impulse to become trinities. Where 
personification had become complete, as in the case of Demeter 
and Kore, or of their doubles, Damia and Auxesia, no third figure 
could lightly be added. Whore the divine pair were still in fiux, 

' Eur. Ion 490. ^ Ymv. Erech. fig. v. 3. 

■' I have collected and discussed this evideuce in 'Mythological Studies,' J. U.S. 
vol. XII. 181)1, p. 3.50. 

* P. I. 18. 2. » r. 1. 2G. 0. « Ov. Mil. 11. 751). 

^ Schol. ad Ar. Theiim. 533 Kara yhp ttjs 'AypavXov w/xwov Kara, di t^j llavdpdjou 
ffTTaviurrtpov. 

" riut. Quaest. Symp. ix. 14. 2. 



288 The Mailing of a Goddess [ch. 

still called b}- merely adjectival titles that had not crystallized 
into proper names, a person more or less mattered little. Thus 
we have a trinity of Semnae, of Horae, of Moirae, but the Thesmo- 
phoroi, who as Thesmophoroi might have easily passed into a 
trinit}^ remain always, because of the clear outlines of Demeter 
and Kore, a duality. 

When we ask what was the impulse to the formation of 
trinities, the answer is necessarily complex. Many strands seem 
to have goue to their weaving. 

First, and perhaps foremost, in the ritual of the lower stratum, 
of the dead and of chthonic powers, three was, for some reason 
that escapes us, a sacred number \ The dead were thrice invoked ; 
sacrifice was offered to them on the third day ; the mourning in 
some parts of Greece lasted three days ; the court of the Areopagus, 
watched over by deities of the underworld, sat, as has been seen 
(p. 242), on three days ; at the three ways the threefold Hecate of 
the underworld was worshipped. It was easy and natural that 
threefold divinities should arise to keep ward over a ritual so consti- 
tuted. When the powers of the underworld came to preside over 
agriculture, the transition from two to three seasons would tend in 
the same direction. For two seasons a duality was enough — the 
Mother for the fertile summer, the Maid for the sterile winter — but, 
when the seasons became three, a trinity was needed, or at least 
would be welcomed. 

Last, the influence of art must not be forgotten, A central 
figure of the mother, with her one daughter, composes ill. Archaic 
art loved heraldic groupings, and for these two daughters were 
essential. Such compositions as that on the Boeotian amphora 
in fig. 59 might easily suggest a trinity^. 

Once the triple form established, it is noticeable that in 
Greek mythology the three figures are always regarded as maiden 
goddesses, not as mothers. They may have taken their rise in the 

^ For three in the cultus of the dead, see Diels, Sibyllinische Blatter, p, 40. 
For a discussion of trinities other than of maiden goddesses, see tJsener, 'Di-eiheit' 
[Rhein. Mus. lviii. pp. 1 — 47). 

- In this connection it may be worth noting that where the nature of the dual 
goddess prevents her taking a central place as in the case of Eileithyia she never 
merges into a trinity. There are often two Eileithyiai, e.g. one to either side of Zeus 
at the birth of Athene, but never three. 



VI] 



The Maiden-Trinities 



•289 



Mother and the Maid, but the Mother falls utterly away. The 
Charites, the Moirae, the Horae, are all essentially maidens. The 
reverse is the ease in Roman religion ; trinities of women god- 
desses of fertility occur frequently in very late Roman art, but 
they are Matres, Mothers^ Three Mothers are rather heavy, and 
do not dance well. 

In the archaic votiv^e relief- in fig. 72 we have the earliest sculp- 
tured representation of the 
maiden trinity extant. Had 
the relief been uninscribed, 
we should have been at a loss 
how to name the three austere 
figures. Two carry fruits, and 
one a wreath. They might 
be Charites or Eumenides, or 
merely nymphs. Most happily 
the sculptor has left no doubt. 
He has written against them 
Kopa? SoTLa<i, ' Sotias (dedi- 
cated) the Korai ' the ' Mai- 
dens.' Sotias has massed the 
three stately figures very 
closely together; he is rever- 
ently conscious that though 
they are three persons, yet 
they are but one goddess. He is half monotheist. 

The same origin of the maiden trinity is clearly indicated in 
the reliefs in fig. 73, found during the ' Enneakrounos ' excava- 
tions in the precinct of Dionysos, at Athens. The main field of 
the relief is occupied by two figures of Panes, with attendant 
Croats ; between them an altar. The Panes are twofold, not 
because they are father and son, but because there were two caves 
of Pan, and the god is thought of as dwelling in each. After the 
battle of Marathon the worship of Pan was established in the 
ancient dancing-ground of the Agraulids ; by the time of Euripides*, 
Pan is thought of as host and they as guests : 

' Eoscher, Lex. s.v. Matres, Matronae. 

-• Frohner, Coll. Tyszldcwisk, PI. xvi.; J. U.S. xix. p. 218, fig. 3. 

« A. Mitt. 1896, p. 2(56, Taf. viii. 




Fig. 72. 



* Eur. Ion 4'JO, trans. Mr D. H. MacCoU. 



H. 



19 



290 



The Making of a Goddess 



[cii. 



'0 seats of Pan and rock hard by 
To where the hollow Long Rocks lie, 
"Where before Pallas' temple-bound 
Agraulos' daughters three go round 
Upon tlieir grassy dancing-ground 

To nimble reedy staves, 
When thou, Pan, art piping found 

Within thy shepherd caves.' 

But Pan was a new-comer ; the Agraulids were there from the 
beginning, as early as Cecrops, their snake-tailed father. Busy 



#1S 





Fig. 73. 

though he is with Pan, the new-comer, the artist cannot, 
may not forget the triple maidens. He figures them in the upper 
frieze, and in quaint fashion he hints that though three they are 
one. In the left-hand corner he sets the image of a threefold 
goddess, a Hecate \ 

But, as time went on, the fact that the three were one is more 



^ For the development of the type of Hecate in conjunction with the Charites, 
see Myth, and Mon. Anc. Athens, p. 373. 



VI] 



The Maiden-Trinities 



291 



and more forgotten. They become three single maidens, led by 
Hermes in the dance ; by Hermes Charidotes, whose worship as 
the young male god of fertility, of flocks and herds, was so closely 
allied to that of the Charites. 

There is no more frequent type of votive reliefs than that of 
which an instance is given in fig. 74. The cave of Pan is the 




Fig. 7-4. 

scene. Pan himself is piping, and the three maidens, led by Hermes, 
dance. The cave, the artist knows, belonged in his days to Pan, 
but the ancient dwellers there, the Maidens, still bulk the largest. 
As a rule the reliefs are not inscribed, sometimes there is a dedica- 
tion ' to the Nymphs.' The personality of the Agraulids has 
become shadowy, they are merely Maidens or Brides. 

The ancient threefold goddesses, as all-powerful Charites, 
paled before the Olympians, faded away into mere dancing 
attendant maidens ; but sometimes, in the myths told of these very 
Olympians, it is possible to trace the reflection of the older 
potencies. A very curious instance is to be fouiid in the familiar 



' In the Vif-nna Mnsoiiin, foiiiid at Gallipoli, Aicli. Kjii'ir. l\Iitt. vol. i. 'Vn(. 1. 
Prof. O. Benndorf, 'Die Chariteii dcH Sokratcs,' Arch. Zeit. 18C'J. 

19—2 



292 



The Making of a Goddess 



[CH. 



story^ of the ' Judgment of Paris,' a story whose development 
and decay are so instructive that it must be examined in some 
detail. 

The 'Judgment of Paris.' 

The myth in its current form is sufficiently patriarchal to 

please the taste of Olympian Zeus himself, trivial and even vulgar 

enough to make material for an ancient Satyr-play or a modern 

opera-houfe. 

'Goddesses three to Ida came 

Immortal strife to settle there — 
Which was the fairest of the three, 
And which the prize of beauty should wear.' 

The bone of contention is a golden apple thrown by Eris at the 
marriage of Peleus and Thetis among the assembled gods. On it 
was written, ' Let the fair one take it,' or, according to some 




Fig. 75. 



authorities, ' The apple for the fair one'-.' The three high god- 
desses betake them for judgment to the king's son, the shepherd 
Paris. The kernel of the myth is, according to this version, a 
KaXKiarelov, a beauty-contest. 

1 The sources for the story are well collected in Eoscher's Lexicon, s.v. Paris, 
but the author of the article seems to have no suspicion of the real substratum of 
the myth. 

- Luc. dial. deor. 20 i} koKt) Xa/3erw. Tzetzes ad Lycophr. 93 t^ koXi to firjXov. 



VI} 



The ' Judfjment of Paris' 



•293 



On one ancient vase, and on one only of all the dozens that 
remain, is the Judgment so figured. The design in fig. 75 is 
from a late red-figured krater in the Bibliotheque Nationale\ 
Paris, dressed as a Phrygian, is seated in the centre. Hermes is 
telling of his mission. Grouped around, the three goddesses 
prepare for the beauty-contest in characteristic fashion. Hera 
needs no aid, she orders her veil and gazes well satisfied in a 
mirror; Aphrodite stretches out a lovely arm, and a Love-God 
fastens ' a bracelet of gold on her flesh ' ; and Athene, watched only 
by the great grave dog, goes to a little fountain shrine and, clean- 
hearted goddess as she is, lays aside her shield, tucks her gown 
about her, and has — a good wash. Our hearts are with Oenone 
when she cries : 

'"O Paris, 
Give it to Pallas!" but he heard me not, 
Or hearing would not hear me, woe is me ! ' 

It is noteworthy that even in this representation, obviously of a 
beauty-contest, the apple is absent. 

It is quite true that now and again one of the goddesses holds 
in her hand a fruit. An instance is given in the charming design 
in fig. 76, from a red-figured stamnos in the British Museum-. 




Fig. 71) 



Fruit and flowers are held indifferently by one or all of the 
goddesses, and the reason will presently become clear. In the 
present case Hera holds a fruit, in fig. 80 the two last goddesses 
hold each a fruit. In fig. 76, against both Aphrodite and Hera, 
is inscribed KaXrj, ' Beautiful,' and before the blin<ling beauty of 
the goddesses Paris veils his face. The insoriptii)n Xapfii8i]<: 



1 Cat. 422. Milliet et Giraudon, I'l. 101. 

2 V. M. Cat. K 28'.). J. U.S. vii. IHHO, p. '.). 



294 



The Making of a Goddess 



[CH. 



enables us to date the vase as belonging to the first half of the 
5th cent. B.C. 

Turning to black-figured vases, a good instance is given in 
fig. 77 from a patera^ in the Museo Greco-Etrusco at Florence. 




Fig. 77. 



The three goddesses, bearing no apple and no attributes, the 
centre one onl}^ distinguished by the spots upon her cloak, follow 
Hermes into the presence of Paris. Paris starts away in manifest 
alarm. In the curious design- in fig. 78, Hermes actually seizes 
Paris by the wrist to compel his attendance. There is here clearly 
no question of voluptuous delight at the beauty of the goddesses. 
The three maiden figures are scrupulously alike ; each carries 
a Avreath. Discrimination would be a hard task. The figures are 
placed closely together, as in the representation of the Maidens in 
fig. 72. 

1 J.H.S. vii. 1SS8, p. 198, fig. 1. 
- J.H.S. VII. 1888, p. 203. 



VI] 



The 'Judgment of Paris' 



295 



Finally, in fig. 79, a design from a black-rigured amphora\ 
we have the type most frequent of all ; Hermes leads the three 




Fig. 78. 



goddesses, but in the Judgment of Paris no figure of Paris is 
present. Without exaggeration it may be said that in three out 
of four representations of the ' Judgment ' in black-figured vase- 
paintings the protagonist is absent. The scene takes the form of 
a simple procession, Hermes leading the three goddesses. 

This curious fact has escaped the attention of no archaeologist 
who has examined the art types of the ' Judgment.' It has been 
variously explained. At a time when vase-paintings were sup- 
posed to have had literary sources, it was usual to attempt a 
literary explanation. Attention was called to the fact that 
Proklos", in his excerpts of the Ki/pria, noted that the goddesses, 
' by command of Zeus were led to Ida by Hermes ' ; of this leading 
it was then supposed that the vase-paintings were ' illustrations.' 

' J.H.S. VII. 1K88, p. 282. 

^ Procl. Kxcerpt. at tt/jos 'AX^^acopov tV'loj; /card Sibi TrpoaTay'qv v(p' 'V]p/j,oO wpbs 
ry)i> Kplffiv dyovrai.. See Schneider, Der troische Snt/enlcrciH, p. ()!), and Welcker, Ep. 
Kijklos, II. HH. 



296 



The Making of a Goddess 



[CH. 



Such methods of interpretation are now discredited ; no one sup- 
poses that the illiterate vase-painter worked with the text of the 
Kypria before him. Art had its own traditions. 

Another explanation, scarcely more happy, has been attempted. 
' Archaic art,' we are told, ' loved processions.' Archaic art, concerned 




Fig. 79. 



to fill the space of a circular frieze surrounding a vase, did indeed 
' love processions,' but not with a passion so fond and unreasonable, 
and it loved something else better, the lucid telling of a story. In 
depicting other myths, archaic art is not driven to express a story 
in the terms of an inappropriate procession ; it is indeed largely 
governed by traditional form, but not to the extent of tolerating 
needless obscurity. The ' Judgment ' is a situation essentially 
stationary, with Paris for centre ; Hermes is subordinate. 

We are so used to the procession form that it requires a certain 
effort of the imagination to conceive of the mythembodied otherwise. 
But, if we shake ourselves loose of preconceived notions, surely the 
natural lucid way of depicting the myth would be something after 
this fashion : Paris in the centre, facing the successful Aphrodite, 



VI] 



The ' Judgment of Paris ' 



297 



to whom he speaks or hands the apple or a crown ; behind him, to 
indicate neglect, the two defeated goddesses ; Hermes anywhere, to 
indicate the mandate of the gods. Such a form does indeed appear 
later, when the vase-painter thought for himself and shook himself 
free of the dominant tradition. The procession form, as we have 
it, was not made for the myth, it was merely adapted and taken 
over, and instantly the suggestion occurs, ' Did not the myth itself 
in some sense rise out of the already existing art form, an art 
form in which Paris had no place, in which the golden apple was 
not ? ' That form was the ancient type of Hermes leading the 
three Korai or Gharites. In the design in fig. 79, the centre 
figure Athene is differentiated by her tall helmet and her aegis. 
Athene is the first of the goddesses to be differentiated — and why ? 
She was not victorious, but the vase-painter is an Athenian, and 
he is concerned for the glory of r) 'Adrjvala Koprj, the Maiden of 
Athens. 

In the design in fig. 80, from a black-figured amphora in the 
Berlin Museum \ the three goddesses are all alike: the first holds 




Fig. 80. 



a flower, the two last fruits, all fitting emblems of the Charites. 
Hermes, their leader, carries a huge irrelevant sheep — irrelevant for 
the herald of the gods on his way to Ida, significant for the 
leader of the Charites, the god of the increase of flocks and herds. 
Does the picture represent a 'Judgment,' or Hermes and the 
Charites ? Who knows ? The doubt is here, as often, more instruc- 
tive than certainty. 

' ISirl. Cat. 21.54. Eiidt, lU'itrli'je zur lonUchen Vasenmalerei, p. 29, figs. 11, 
12 and U. 



298 The Making of a Goddess [ch. 

From vases alone it would be sufficiently evident, I think, 
that the ' Judgment of Paris ' ^ is really based on Hermes and 
the Charites, but literary evidence confirms the view. The 
Kpi(TL<;, the Decision, of Paris is always as much a Choice as a 
Judgment ; a Choice somewhat like that invented for Heracles by 
the philosopher Prodicus, though at once more spontaneous and 
more subtle than that rather obvious effort at edification. The 
particular decision is associated in legend with the name of a 
special hero, of one particular 'young man moving to and fro 
alone, in an empty hut in the firelight".' It is an anguish of 
hesitancy ending in a choice which precipitates the greatest 
tragedy of Greek legend. But before Paris was there the Choice 
was there. The exact elements of the Choice vary in different 
versions. Athene is sometimes Wisdom and sometimes War. 
But in general Hera is Royalty or Grandeur ; Athene is Prowess ; 
Aphrodite of course is Love. And what exactly has the ' young 
man ' to decide ? Which of the three is fairest ? Or whose gifts 
he desires the most ? It matters not at all, for both are different 
ways of saying the same thing. Late writers, Alexandrian and 
Roman, degrade the story into a beauty-contest between three 
thoroughly personal goddesses, vulgar in itself and complicated by 
bribery still more vulgar. But early versions scarcely distinguish 
the goddesses from the gifts they bring. There is no difference be- 
tween them except the difference of their gifts. They are Charites, 
Gift-bringers. They are their own gifts. Or, as the Greek put 
it, their gifts are their arj/xela, their tokens. And Hermes had 
led them long since, in varying forms, before the eyes of each and 
all of mankind. They might be conceived as undifferentiated, as 
mere Givers-of-Blessing in general. But it needed only a little 
reflection to see that Xapt? often wars against Xa/3t9, and that if 
one be chosen, others must be rejected*. 

As gift-givers the same three goddesses again appear in the 

1 The figure of Paris which does not here concern us came in with the popu- 
larity of the Homeric cycle, and the connection between the conflict of ffij/ueia and 
the Trojan war may probably have been due to the author of the Kypria. 

2 Eur. Andr. 281. 

3 Since the above was written I see that Eustathius (§ 1665. 59) expi-essly states 
that Aphrodite strove icith the Charites : ivda iplaai. rrepi kclWovs ttjv re ' A<ppo5lTy)v koI 
Tas XdpiTas ah dvbfiara Tiaaidi-r), KoXtj koI EiKppoffvvT], top de SiKaaavTa Kp'ivai Ka\7)v 
T7]v KoK-qv, rjv /cat yfifxai top "Yicpaiarov. He goes on to say that Kal^ married 
Arachnos in Crete and that Arachnos fxLyivra avx^^v rfj 'A<ppodiTrj ixi-yfivai. 



A^i] The ' Judfjment of Paris' 299 

myth of the daughters of Pandareos, but this time they are not 
rivals ; and with them comes a fourth, Artemis, whose presence is 
significant. Homer tells the story by the mouth of Penelope^: 

' Their father and their mother dear died by the gods' high doom, 
The maidens were left orphans alone within their lionie ; 
Fair Aphrodite gave them curds and honey of the bee 
And lovely wine, and Hera made them very fair to see, 
And wise beyond all women-folk. And holy Artemis 
Made them to wax in stature, and Athene for their bliss 
Taught them all glorious handiworks of woman's artifice.' 

The maiden goddesses tend the maidens, but to Homer the 
Maiden above all others is Artemis, sister of Apollo, daughter of 
Zeus'-. He puts the story into the mouth of Penelope as part of a 
prayer to Artemis. 

But, owing to the influence of Homer and the civilization he 
represented, the figure of Artemis Avaxes more and more dominant, 
and this especially by contrast with the Kore of the lower stratum, 
Aphrodite. In the Hippolytus of Euripides they are set face to 
face in their eternal enmity. The conflict is for the poet an issue 
of two moral ideals, but the human drama is played out against 
the shadowy background of an ancient racial theomachy, the 
passion of the South against the cold purity of the North. 

Belonging as she does to this later Northern stratum, the 
figure of Artemis lies properly outside our province, but to one of 
the ancient maiden trinity, to Athene, she lent much of her cold, 
clean strength. An epigram' to her honour in the Antliology is 
worth noting, because it shows, clearly and beautifully, how the 
maidenhood of the worshipper mirrors itself in the worship of 
a maiden, whether of the .South or of the North : 

' ^laid of the Mere, Timaretc; here brings, 

Before she weds, her cymbals, her dear ball 
To thee a Maid, her maiden offerings, 

Her snood, her maiden dolls, their clothes and all. 
Hold, Leto's Child, above Timaret^ 
Thine hand, and keep her virginal like thee.' 

' Honi. Od. XX. 07. 

- I follow Prof. Kidgeway (J.H.S. 1898, p. xxxiv) in holding that Artemis with 
her father Zeus and her brother Apollo are inirnif^rants from tlio North, divinities 
of the Achaean stock. Hence tljeir doMiiniin(!e in Homer. 
* Anthol. Falat. vi. 280; the play on Kdpa in the lines 

Tttj T€ A'ipas, Aifj.i'dTL KOpif, Ki)pa, uis iiriUK^i 
&vdtTO Kal TO. Kopav tvovfiar 'ApT^/JLibt 
cannot be rendered in EnglJHh. 



300 The Making of a Goddess [ch. 

It would be a lengthy though in some respects a profitable 
task to take each maiden form that the great matriarchal goddess 
assumed and examine it in turn, to enquire into the rise and 
development of each local Kore, of Dictynna, of Aphaia, of Callisto, 
of Hecate, of Bendis and the like. Instead it will be necessary to 
confine ourselves to the three great dominant Korai of the ' Judg- 
ment,' Hera, Athene and Aphrodite. 



Athene. 

The doubt has probably long lurked in the reader's mind, 
whether two of the three, Hera and Aphrodite, have any claim 
to the title ' maiden.' Happily in the case of Athene no such 
difficulty arises. vShe is tlie Parthenos, the maiden ; her temple 
is the maiden-chamber, the Parthenon ; natural motherhood she 
steadfastly refuses, she is the foster-mother of heroes after the old 
matriarchal fashion ; Ge, the real mother, bears Erichthonios, and 
Athene nurtures him to manhood ; she bears the like relationship 
to Herakles, she is the maiden of Herakles ('H/oa/cXeoy? Koprj^). 

Moreover it has been frequently observed that the early form 
of her name Athenaia is purely adjectival", she is the Athenian 
one, the Athenian Maid, Pallas, our Lady of Athens. Plato ^ in 
the Laws sees clearly that Athenaia is but the local Kore, the 
incarnation of Athens, though, after the fashion of his day, he 
inverts cause and effect ; he makes the worshipper in the image of 
the worshipped. Speaking of the armed Athene, he says, 'and 
methinks our Kore and Mistress who dwells among us, joying her 
in the sport of dancing, was not minded to play with empty hands, 
but adorned her with her panoply, and thus accomplished her 
dance, and it is fitting that in this our youths and our maidens 
should imitate her.' It was she who imitated her youths and 
maidens, she who was the very incarnation of their life and being, 
dancing in armour as they danced, fighting when they fought, 
born of her father's head when they were reborn as the children of 
Reason and Light. 

1 Dilthe.v, Arch. Zeit. 1873. 
- Pauly-Wissowa s.v. Athena, p. 1941, 50. 

^ Plat. Legg. 796 r; 5e av irov wap 7)n1v Koprj /cat 5i<Tiroiva...a 5?; Trdirws /MueiaOai 
■Kpiwov hv eit} Kopovs re d/xa /cat Kdpas. 



vi] AtJiene 301 

Athene's other name, Pallas, tells the same tale. If Athene is 
the Kore of the local clan of the Athenians, Pallas is the Kore of 
the clan of the Pallantidae, the foes of Athenian Theseus ; later 
their male eponym was Pallas ^ : 

' Pallas had for lot 
The southern land, rough Pallas, he who rears 
A brood of giants.' 

The very name Pallas means, it would seem, like Kore, the 
maiden. Suidas in defining the word says, ' a great maiden, and 
it is an epithet of Athene,' More expressly Strabo-, in discussing 
the cults of Egyptian Thebes, says, ' To Zeus, whom they worship 
above all other divinities, a maiden of peculiar beauty and illus- 
trious family is dedicated ; such maidens the Greeks call Fallades.' 
Tliis local Pallas had for her dominion the ancient court of the 
Palladium ; her image as Pallas, not as Athene, was carried in pro- 
cession by the epheboi^; but with the subjection of her clan her 
figure waned, effaced by that of Athenaia. Pallas became a mere 
adjectival praenoriien to Athene, as Phoebus to Apollo. It may be 
conjectured that this ancient image of Pallas was resident on the 
Areopagos, home of the ancient Semnae, a place probably of sacred 
association to a local clan long before the dominance of the 
Acropolis ; it is by her name of Pallas that the Semnae * hail the 

goddess : 

' I welcome Pallas' fellowship.' 

In such a matter a poet might well have been instinctively, though 
unconsciously, true to fact. 

To tell the story of the making of Athene is to trace the 
history of the city of Athens, to trace perhaps, in so far as they 
can be severed, its political rather than its religious development. 
At first the maiden of the elder stratum, she has to contend for 
supremacy with a god of that stratum, Poseidon. Poseidon, the 
late Mr R A. Neil"' has shown, was the god of the ancient aristocracy 
of Athens, an aristocracy based, as they claimed descent from 

' Soph. frg. ap. Strabo § 392. That Pallas was the eponymous hero ol' tlie 
Pallantidae was first pointed out by Diincker, Hut. of Greece, vol. i. p. 113. 

- Strab. XVII. 4G § Hid wapdivoi Itparai as KoKovcnv ol "V!X\r)ve'i TraXXdoas : 
see A. Pick, Indogerm. licltriKje 189(5. 

•' CI. A. II. 470. 10 avvf^riyayoi' oi {oi ^(pr)fioi) llaXXdSa ijhto. tQiv yivv-qruiv Kal 
ndXiv elff-qyayov liera Trdcrrjs evKocr/jLlas. 

■• Aesch. Kuiii. 916. 

^ The KiurjhtH of AiintophmieH, p. 83. 



302 The Making of a Goddess [ch. 

Poseidon, on patriarchal conditions. The rising democracy not 
unnaturally revived the ancient figure of the Kore, but in reviving 
her they strangely altered her being and reft from her much of 
her beauty and reality. They made her a sexless thing, neither 
man nor woman ; she is laden with attributes like the Parthenos 
of Pheidias, charged with intended significance, but to the end she 
remains manufactured, unreal, and never convinces us. She is, in 
fact, the Tyche, the Fortune of the city, and the real object of the 
worship of the citizens was not the goddess but the city herself, 
' immortal mistress of a band of lovers^ ' : 

' The grace of tlie town that hath on it for crown 

But a head-band to wear 

Of violets one-hued with her hair, 
For the vales and the green high places of earth hold nothing so fair 
And the depths of the sea know no such birth of the manifold births they bear,' 

a city, 

' Based on a crystalline sea 
Of thought and its eternity.' 

Nowhere is this artificiality, this unreality of Athene as distinct 
from Athens so keenly felt as in the famous myth of her birth from 
the brain of Zeus. A poet may see its splendour : 

' Her life as the lightning was flashed from the light of her Father's head,' 

but it remains a desperate theological expedient to rid an earth- 
born Kore of her matriarchal conditions. The Homeric Hymn^ 
writer surrounds the Birth with all the apparatus of impressive- 
ness, yet it never impresses ; the goddess is manifestly to him 
Reason, Light and Liberty ; she is born at the rising of the Sun : 

' Hyperion's bright son stayed 
His galloping steeds for a sjjace.' 

The event is of cosmic import : 

' High 01ym})us reeled 
At the wrath in the sea-grey eyes and Earth on every side 
Bang with a ten^ible cry, and the Deep was disquieted 
With a tumult of purple waves and outpouring of the tide 
Suddenly. 

Fear takes hold of all the Immortals, and ' the Councillor Zeus 
is glad,' but the mortal reader remains cold. It is all an unreal, 

1 See Mr Gilbert Murray, Ancient Greek Literature, p. 178. 

2 Horn. Hijmn. xxviii., translated by Mr D. S. MacColl. 



^^] 



Athene 



303 



theatrical show, aud through it all we feel and resent the theo- 
logical intent. We cannot love a goddess who on principle forgets 
the Earth from which she sprang ; always from the lips of the Lost 
Leader we hear the shameful denial^ : 

' There is no mother bore me for her child, 
I praise the Man in all things (save for marriage), 
Whole-hearted am I, strongly for the Father.' 

Politics and literature turned the local Kore of Athens into 
a non-human, unreal abstraction. It is pleasant to find that the 
art of the simple conservative vase-painter remembered humbler 
beginnings. The design in fig. 81 is from a Corinthian alabastron 
in the Museum at Breslau-. In the 
centre of the design, Herakles is en- 
gaged in slaying a Hydra with an un- 
usuall}' large number of heads. lolaos 
comes up from the right to engage 
some of the heads, the charioteer of 
lolaos, Lapythos, waits in the chariot. 




T^=^ 




Fig. 81. 



Throughout the design all the figures are carefully and legibly 
inscribed in early Corinthian letters, dating about the beginning 
of the 6th century B.C. ' Athena,' the Maiden of Herakles, has 
also come up (to the left) in her chariot to help her hero. Just 
behind her, perched on the goad, is a woman-headed bird. Had 
there been no inscription we should at once have named it a 
•'decorative Siren,' but against the woman-headed bird is clearly 
written FoO?. At first sight the inscription does not seem to help 
much, but happily the lexicographers enable us to explain the 
wordl The Etf/inologicon Magnum tells us that by 7rcovyye<i 

1 Aesch. Enm. 730. 

2 HoHsbach, Grierliinche Aiitiken des arch. Museums in Breslau, Festgruss 40 d. 
Philolo;n'H (Gurlitz, 1889), Taf. i. 

* The meaning of the woman -headed bird and of her name was first seen by 
Dr Maximilian Mayer, 'Mythhistorica,' Ilcrmes xxvn. p. 483. 



304 The Making of a Goddess [ch. 

are meant aWviai, and that another form of the word was ^ovyye';. 
Hesychius merely states that the ttoov^ is ' a kind of bird,' and refers 
us to Aristotle^ ' On Animals.' Our text of Aristotle gives the form 
(j)oov^. It seems clear that the Fou? of the Corinthian vase is 
a variant form of a name given to the Diver-bird. 

The inscriptions prove the vase to be Corinthian, and Corinth 
is not far remote from Megara. Pausanias", in discussing the 
genealogies of Athenian kings, tells us that Pandiou fled to 
Megara. There he fell sick and died, and by the sea in the 
territory of Megara is his tomb, on a cliff which is called the cliff 
of Athene Aithuia, i.e. Athene the Diver-bird. Bird myths 
haunt the family of Pandion : Procne, Philomela, Itys and Tereus* 
all turn into birds, and Tereus, the hoopoe, had a regular cult at 
his grave. There, they say, the hoopoe first appeared, and the 
story looks like a reminiscence of a bird soul seen haunting a 
grave. Lycophron knows of a maiden goddess, a Diver-bird ; he 
makes Cassandra in her prophetic madness foresee the outrage of 
Ajax and her own empty prayers* : 

'In vain shall I invoke the Diver-Maid.' 

Returning, with this evidence in our minds, to the woman- 
headed bird in fig. 81, the conclusion seems inevitable that we 
have in her an early local form of Athene. The vase-painter had 
advanced to an anthropomorphic conception of the goddess, so he 
draws her in full human form as Athene, but he is haunted by 
the remembrance of the Megarian Diver, Aithuia, so he adds her 
figure, half as the double of Athene (hence the parallelism of 
attitude), half as attendant, and calls her FoO?. Athene on the 
Acropolis had another attendant bird, the little owl that still at 
evening haunts the sacred hill and hoots among the ruins of the 
Parthenon. Whatever bird was locally abundant and remarkable 
would naturally attach itself to the goddess, and be at first her 
vehicle and later her attribute : at seaside Megara the diver, at 
Athens the owl. The vase-painter remembers Athens as well as 
Megara, and adds for completeness a little owl. 

1 Ar. Hist. Anini. ix. 18, p. 617 a 9. 

2 P. I. 5. 3 and i. 41. 6 ; see Dr Frazer ad loe. ^ P. i. 41. 9. 

^ Lye. Ale. 359. lu connection with Lycophron's account it is curious to find 
that in the earhest known representation of the rape of Cassandra in vase- 
paintings (J.H.S. 1884, PI. XL.) behind the figure of Atliene stands a large human- 
headed bird, but this may be a mere coincidence. 



Yl] 



Athene 



305 



The design in fig. 82 is from a black-figured lekythos in a 
private collection in Sicily ^ The scene represents Cassandra 




Fig. 82. 

flying from Ajax and taking refuge at the xoanon of Athene. To 
the left stands old King Priara, in helpless anguish. The notable 
point about the scene is that Athene, who, statue though she be, is 
apparently about to move to the rescue, has sent as her advance 
guard her sacred animal, a great snake. The snake is clearly 
regarded as the vehicle of the wrath of the goddess. Just such 
a snake did Chrj^se, another local Kore, send out against the 
intruder Philoctetes-, and the snake of Chryse, Sophocles ex- 
pressly tells us, was the secret guardian of the open-air shrine. 
This ' house-guarding snake,' we may conjecture, was the earliest 
form of every earth-born Kore. At Athens, in the chryselephantine 
statue of Pheidias, it crouched beneath the shield, and tradition 
said it was the earth-born hero Erichthonios, fostered by the god- 
dess. But almost certainly this guardian snake was primarily the 
guardian genius and fate of the city, before that genius or fate 
emerged to the status of godhead. When the Persians besieged 
the citadel, Herodotus* says, the guardian snake left the honey 
cake that was its monthly sacrificial food untouched, and, 'when 



' 0. Bennilorf, Gricchinchc and Sicilisclie Vascnbildcr, yl. 51. 1. 
'^ Soph. Phil. VA-n. 
^ Herod, viii. 11. 



H. 



20 



306 



The MaJiing of a Goddess 



[CH. 



the priestess told this, the Athenians the more readily and eagerly 
forsook their city, inasmuch as it seemed that the goddess had 
abandoned the citadel.' 

The design in fig. 83 is from a late red-figured lekythos in 
the National Museum at Athens^ The scene represented is a 




Fig. 83. 



reminiscence of the Judgment of Paris, but one goddess only is 
present, Athene, and by her side, equal in height and majesty, 
a great snake. The artist seems dimly conscious that the snake 
is somehow the double of Athene". To the left is the figure of a 
woman, probably Helen; she seems to be imploring the little 
xoanon of Athene to be gracious. Eros is apparently drawing 
the attention of Paris away from Athene to Helen. 

Athene, by the time she appears in art, has completely .shed 
her animal form, has reduced the shapes she once wore of snake 
and bird to attributes, but occasionally in black-figured vase 
paintings she still appears with wings. On the obverse of the 
black-figured cup^ in fig. 84 the artist gives her wings : but for her 
helmet we might have called her an Erinys. In the Eumenides 
of Aeschylus, a play in which Athene is specially concerned to 

1 CoUignon et Couve, Cat. 1942. Jahrbuch d. Inst. Anzeiger, 1896, p. 36. 

2 Since the above was written Mr Evans has discovered at Cnossos the figure 
of a goddess with a snake in either hand and a snake or snakes coiled about her 
head. She may prove to be the prototype of Athene, of the Erinys and of many 
another form of Earth-goddess. See Annual British School, ix. 1903, p. 74, Fig. 54. 

3 Coll. Faina. RiJm. Mitt. 1897, xii. pi. 12. Another instance of a winged 
Athene occurs on the fine vase published by Mr A. de Bidder, Cat. Bihl. Nat. 
No. 269, p. 173, fig. 23. Athene flies over the sea carrying the dead body of a hero. 
Here she performs the ofiice of Eos or of a Death- Siren or Harpy. 



VI] 



Aphrodite 



307 



slough off all traces of primitive origin, she lays suspicious 
emphasis on the fact that she can fly without wings^ : 

' With foot unwearied haste I without wings, 
"Whirred onward by my aegis' sweUing sail' 




Fig. 84. 



On the reverse of the vase she is wingless : the artist has no clear 
conviction. The vase is instructive as showing how long the art 
type of a divinity might remain in flux. 



Aphrodite. 

The next of the three 'Maidens' to be considered is Aphrodite. 
A doubt perhaps arises as to her claim to bear the name. Kore 
she is in her eternal radiant youth : Kore as virgin she is not. She 
is ratlier Nymplie the Bride, but she is the Bride of the old order ; 
she is never wife, never tolerates permanent patriarchal wedlock. 
In the lovely Homeric hymn it is clear that hor will is for love, not 
marriage. Admitted to the patriarchal Olympus, an attempt 



^ Aesch. Eum. 407. 



20—2 



308 The Making of a Goddess [ch. 

foolish and futile is made to attach her to one husband, the 
craftsman Hephaistos, and, significantly enough, her other name 
as his bride is Charis\ She is the Charis of physical beauty 
incarnate. 

In Homer it is evident that she is a new-comer to Olympus, 
barely tolerated, an alien, and always thankful to escape. Like 
the other alien, Ares, she is fain to be back in her own home. 
Her Homeric titles, Kypris and Kythereia, show that originally 
and locally she is goddess of the island South, never really at 
home in the cold austere North, where Artemis loved to dwell. 
She has about her too much of the physical joy of life ever to find 
an abiding home far from the sunshine. 

Another note of her late coming into Greece proper is that she is 
in Homer a departmental goddess, having for her sphere one human 
passion. The earlier forms of divinities are of larger import, they 
tend to be gods of all work. When the fusion of tribes and the 
influence of literature conjointly bring together a number of local 
divinities, perforce, if they are to hold together, they divide func- 
tions and attributes, i.e. become departmental. Poseidon, who 
locally was Phytalmios, is narrowed down to the god of one 
element ; Hermes, who at home had dominion over flocks and 
herds and all life and growth, becomes merely a herald. 

Some such process of narrowing of functions has, we may 
suspect, gone on in the shaping of the figure of Aphrodite. It 
would be rash to assert that she was primarily an earth-goddess, 
but certain traits in her cult and character show clearly that she 
had analogies with the ' Lady of the Wild Things.' Fertile 
animals belong to her, especially the dove and the goat, the dove 
probably from very early days. In the Mycenaean shrine recently 
discovered by Mr Arthur Evans, one of the figures of goddesses, a 
quaint early figure with cylindrical body and upraised hands, bears 
on her head a dove. Such a figure, dating more than a thousand 
years B.C., may be the prototype of Aphrodite. About the 
cylindrical bodies of other similar figures snakes are coiled, as 
though to mark an earth-goddess. In those early days differentia- 
tion was not sharply marked, and as yet we dare not give to these 
early divinities Olympian names. 

At Pompeii the excavations have recently brought to light the 

1 II. XVIII. 382. 



VI] 



A2}hrodite 



309 



charming relief in fig. 85 ^ a relief which from its style must date 
about the turn of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. A goddess is 




Fig. 85. 

seated Demeter-like upon the ground, and holds her sceptre as 
Queen. Worshippers approach, man and wife and children. The 
offerings they bring, a sheep and a dove, mark the goddess as 
Aphrodite. 

The myth of her birth from the sea — a myth which probably 
took its rise in part from a popular and dubious etymology — 
seems, at first sight, to sever Aphrodite wholly from the company 
of the earth-born Korai. And yet, even here, when w^e come to 
examine the art-forms of the myth, it is at once manifest that the 
Sea-birth is but the Anodos adopted and adapted. 

The design in fig. 86 is from a red-figured hydria- now in the 
museum of the Municipio at Genoa. It dates about the middle 
of the 5th century B.C. and is, so far as I know, the only instance 
of the birth of Aphrodite in a vase-painting. In the centre of the 
picture a goddess, clad only in a chiton, rises up from below, 
but whether from sea or land the vase-painter is apparently not 
concerned to express. Had he wished to utter his meaning 
more precisely nothing would have been easier than to represent 

' From a photo(?raph. The slab is now in the Museum at Naples. 
- E. Petersen, IVhn. Mittheil 189(», pi. vir. p. 154. 



310 



The Making of a Goddess 



[CH. 



the sea by the curved lines that in his day were the con- 
ventional indication of waves. But he is silent and I think 




Fig. 86. 

signiticantly. The goddess on the vase-painting is received by a 
slender winged Eros ; she uplifts her hands to take the taenia 
with which he greets her. Eros is here grown to young manhood 
and his presence at once makes us think of Aphrodite ; but we 
are bound to remember that on the Ashmolean amphora already 
discussed (fig. 71) it is the Anodos of Pandora, not of Aphrodite, 
that is greeted by the Love-god with a taenia. Moreover, it must 
also be remembered that on the Berlin krater (fig. 68) a Love-god 
greets the rising of an Earth-goddess, be she Ge or Kore or 
Semele'. 

So far then all that can safely be said is that on the Genoa 
hydria we have the Anodos of a goddess greeted by Eros. But to 
the right of the picture, behind the rising goddess, stands another 
figure, a woman, and she holds out a piece of drapery with which 



1 Some further instances of the rising of an Earth-goddess greeted by Erotes 
will be discussed in Chapter xii., and see p. 569. 



vi] Aphrodite 311 

she is about to clothe the rising goddess. This is a new element 

in the Anodos type and it is this element that inclines me, with 

certain reservations and qualifications, to call the goddess Aphrodite, 

though I am by no means sure that the vase-painter conceives her 

as Hsiny from the sea. 

On two occasions, according to ancient tradition, Aphrodite is 

received and decked by her women attendants, be they Charites 

or Horae, on her Birth from the Sea and after her sacred Bath in 

Paphos. Of the Bath we hear in the lay of Demodocus^ He 

tells how after the joy and terror of her marriage with Ares she 

uprose 

'And fast away fled she, 
Aphrodite, lover-of-laughter, to Cyprus over the sea, 
To the pleasant shores of Paphos and the incensed altar-stone, 
Where the Graces washed her body, and shed sweet balm thereon, 
Ambrosial balm that shineth on the Gods that wax not old, 
And wrapped her in lovely raiment, a wonder to behold.' 

Of the bedecking at the Birth we learn in a Homeric Hymn- : 

'For the West Wind breathed to Cyprus and lifted her tenderly 
And bore her down the billow and the stream of the sounding sea 
In a cup of delicate foam. And the Hours in wreaths of gold 
Uprose in joy as she came, and laid on her fold on fold 
Fragrant raiment immortal, and a crown on the deathless head.' 

The two events, the ritual Bath and the Sea-birth, are not 
I think clearly distinguished, and both have somehow their 
counterpart in the making and decking of Pandora. The ritual 
bath-' Aphrodite shared with the two other Korai, Athene and 
Hera. Callimachus devotes a Hymn to the ' Bath of Pallas.' 
Pallas in her austerity, even when she contends for the prize of 
beauty, rejects the mirror and gold ornaments and mingled 
unguents ; but, because she is maiden goddess, year by year she 
must renew her virginity by the bath in the river Inachus. The 
renewal of virginity is no fancy. Pausanias'* saw at Naiiplia a 
spring called Canathus and the Argives told him that every year 
Hera bathed in it and became a virgin. He adds significantly, ' this 

1 Horn. Oil. VIII. 270. 

- Ilmn. llijiiin vi. 2, trans, by Mr Gilbert Murray. 

•■' At Sc-kyoii, though we are not expressly told of a bath of Aphrodite, she had a 
niaiden-priesteHS who was called LoutiophoroH, see P. ii. 10. 4. The Orpliic Jlymn to 
Aphrodite (lv. ID) joins together the notions of bath and birth: MyvnTov \-ciWx"5 
iip7)% yoviixiliOia XovTpd. 

* P. II. 38. 2. 



312 The Making of a Goddess [ch. 

story is of the mysteries and is their explanation of a rite which 
they celebrate to Hera.' Virginity was to these ancients in their 
wisdom a grace not lost but perennially renewed, hence the 
immortal maidenhood of Aphrodite. 

The artist of the Genoa hydria jwobahly knew of the birth of 
Aphrodite from the sea, he certainly knew of her reception by 
Eros ; but that he remembered also the ritual bath is, I think, 
clear from the fact that the scene is laid in a sanctuary, indicated 
in the vase-painter's fashion by the altar and sacred palm-tree 
standing to the right just below the handle. Probably the 
sanctuary at Paphos is intended. 

The Genoa hydria is of great importance because it helps to 
the understanding of another monument, earlier and far more 
beautiful. 

The design in fig. 87 is from a sculptured slab^ one of three 

that served to decorate the so-called ' Ludovisi Throne ' now in 

the Boncompagni collection in the Museo delle Terme at Rome. 

Again we have manifestly an Anodos, again the like uncertainty 

as to who the goddess is and whence she uprises. The two women 

who support her, and to whom in her uprising she clings, stand on 

a sloping bank of shingle. Between the edges of the banks is no 

indication of the sea, simply a straight line. Is the goddess rising 

from earth or sea or sacred river or ritual bath ? Archaeologists 

offer , explanations apparently the most diverse, and it is this 

doubt and diversity that instruct. One sees in the design the 

Birth of Aphrodite from the Sea, another a ceremonial Bath at 

the lesser mysteries of Agrae, another the Anodos of Kore. No 

one, so far as I am aware, sees that the artist is haunted by, is as 

1 Eeproduced from a photograph. The relief is published and fully discussed 
by Dr Petersen, Rnm. Mittheilungen, 1892, Taf. ii. p. 32. The relief with two other 
slabs manifestly belonging to the same structure came to light on a Sunday during 
the summer of 1887, during the absence of the official insi^ector, in the piece of 
ground formerly belonging to the Villa Ludovisi and now bounded by the Vie 
Boncompagni, Abbruzzi e Piemonte. It is said to have been found in an upright 
position, but as no other monuments came to light, though the ground was 
examined to a depth of 50 metres, the reliefs were probably not hi situ. Dr Petersen 
thinks they formed the three sides of a throne of Aphrodite. They may, however, 
have formed part of the decoration of the mouth of a well. That they were in 
some way connected with Aphrodite is practically certain from the design on the 
two other reliefs (not figured here). These represent respectively a nude woman 
playing on the double fiutes, who, from the analogy of similar representations on 
vase-paintings, is certainly a hetaira, and a woman draped and veiled bringing 
incense who is probably a bride. The various interpretations and restorations of 
the monument are given by Dr Helbig, Fiilirer Rom ii. p. 128, and Antike Denk- 
mdler d. K. Arch. Inst. vol. ii. PI. 6 and 7, p. 3. 



VI] 



Ajjhrodite 



010 
010 



it were halting between, reminiscences of each and all. Or rather 
the Anodos, the Bath, the Birth are as yet undifferentiated. By 
their articulation and separation we have immeasurably lost. 




Fig. 87. 



One other point remains. On the Ludovisi relief we have no 
Eros. The relief is archaic. The straight folds of the drapery, 
the delicate over-long feet, the strong chin, the over-emphasis of 
the lovely breasts, all remind us vividly of red-figured vases of the 
severe style ; they belong to the last bloom of archaism just before 
the perfect utterance of Pheidias. Pheidias^ on the pedestal of 
the image of Zeus at Olympia sculptured ' Eros receiving Aphro- 
dite as she rises from the sea and Peitho crowning Aphrodite.' 
Pheidias was much, perhaps over, inspired by Homeric tradition, 
hence a certain sense of literary chill in his conceptions. He 
forgets the ritual Bath, and remembers the mythological Birth. 
The artist of the Genoa hydria is very near to his tradition, Init 
the drapery held by Peitho, the altar and the ])alm-tree, recall 
I'ather the Bath than the Birth. But the sculptor of the relief 

> I'. V. 11. 8. 



314 The Making of a Goddess [ch. 

embodies a tradition more theological, less mythological, than 
either Pheidias or the vase-painter. He is inspired by the Anodos^ 
and the Bath, which was but one of its ritual humanized forms, 
and a form that we may venture to call matriarchal. What he is 
concerned to show is the birth and re-birth of Aphrodite, Aphro- 
dite untouched of Eros, eternally virgin, central figure of a Trinity 
of Maidens and, as Ourania, She of the Heavens. 

Aphrodite as island queen comes to have a birth from the sea, 
but a poet remembers that, though she is of the sea and of the 
air, she is of earth also : 

' We have seen thee, Love, thou art fair, thou art goodly, Love, 
Thy wings make light in the air as the wings of a dove; 
Thy feet are as winds that divide the stream of the sea, 
Earth is thy covering to hide thee, the garment of thee.' 

Aphrodite the earth-born Kore is also sea-born, as became an 
island Queen, but more than any other goddess she becomes 
Ourania, the Heavenly One, and the vase-painter sets her sailing 
through heaven on her great swan". She is the only goddess who 
in passing to the upper air yet kept life and reality. Artemis 
becomes unreal from sheer inhumanity ; Athene, as we have seen, 
becomes a cold abstraction ; Demeter, in Olympus, is but a lovely 
metaphor. As man advanced in knowledge and in control over 
nature, the mystery and the godhead of things natural faded into 
science. Only the mystery of life, and love that begets life, 
remained, intimately realized and utterly uu explained ; hence 
Aphrodite keeps her godhead to the end. For a while, owing to 
special social conditions, and, as will be seen, owing to the impulse 
of Orphism, her figure is effaced by that of her son Eros, but 
effaced only to re-emerge with a new dignity as Mother rather 
than Maid. In the image of Venus Genetrix^ we have the old 
radiance of Aphrodite, but sobered somehow, grave with the 
hauntings of earlier godheads, with shadows about her cast by 

1 Since the above was written I see that M. Joubin {La Sculpture Grecque entre 
les guerreft nu'diques et Vepoque tie PericleA, p. 204) has anticipated me in using the 
Genoa vase as evidence to show that the uprising:; woman in the Ludovisi relief is 
Aphrodite. But unfortunately M. .Joubin fails to see that Aphrodite is also Kore; 
he says, 'D'autres archeologues avaient identifie le personnage tigur6 a mi-corps 
avec Kore ou Ge ; mais la decouverte du vase de Genes coupe court toutes ees 
interpretations.' This is to my mind to miss the real religious significance of the 
figure ; but 'SI. .Joubin is, of course, mainly concerned with artistic criticism. 

- Brit. Mus. Cat. d 2. The best reproduction of this beautiful vase is plate xv. 
of White Athenian Vases in Brit. Mus. •* Lucret. i. 1. 



VI] 



Hera 315 



Ourania, by Harmonia, by Kourotrophos, by Eirene, by each and 

every various form of the ancient Mother of Earth and Heaven : 

' Of Rome the Mother, of men and gods the pleasure, 
Fostering Venus, under heaven's gliding signs 
Thou the ship-bearing sea, fruit-bearing land 
Still hauntest, since by thee each living thing 
Takes life and birth and sees the light of the sun. 

Thee, goddess, the winds fly from, thee the clouds 
And thine approach ; for thee the daedal earth 
Sends up sweet flowers, the ocean levels smile, 
And heaven shines with floods of light appeased. 

Thou, since alone thou rulest all the world 
Xor without thee can any living thing 
Win to the shores of light and joy and love, 
Goddess, bid thou throughout the seas and land 
The works of furious war quieted cease.' 



Hera. 

The figure of Hera remains. At first sight she seems all wife, 
not maiden ; she is the great typical bride, Hera Teleia, queen 
in Olympus by virtue of her marriage with Zeus ; their Sacred 
Marriage is the prototype of all human wedlock. This is true for 
Homeric theology, but a moment's reflection on the facts of local 
cultus and myth shows that this marriage was not from the 
beginning. The Hera who in the ancient Argonautic legend is 
queen in Thessaly and patron of the hero Jason is of the old 
matriarchal type ; it is she, Pelasgian Hera, not Zeusy who is really 
dominant ; in fact Zeus is practically non-existent. In Olympia, 
where Zeus in historical days ruled if anywhere supreme, the 
ancient Heraion where Hera was worshipped alone long predates 
the temple of Zeus. At Argos the early votive terra-cottas' are 
of a woman goddess, and the very name of the sanctuary, the 
Heraion, marks her supremacy. At Samos, at the curious festival 
of the Tonea'-, it is the image of a woman goddess that is carried 

^ As long ago as 1857, H. D. Miiller in his remarkable book Mytliolotiii' der 
Griechischen SUimme, pp. 249 — 255, saw that Zeus and Hera belonged to stocks 
racially distinct, and that in the compulsory marriage of Hera to Zens is reflected 
the subjugation of a primitive race to Achaean invaders. In discussing the 
American excavations at Argos I followed his leading, see 'Primitive Hera- Worship,' 
CI. Rcciew, Dec. 181)2, p. 474, and 1H'.>6, p. 44. The relation of Hera to Zeus has 
since been examined by Mr A. B. Cook with far wider learning than I could com- 
mand, see 67. lievieic, I'JOO, p. Hfio, and p. 410. For the connection of the name 
"Hpa with T/'pws see the important evidence from inscriptions adduced by Dr Sam 
Wide in bis 'Chthonische and Himmliscbe Gotter,' Archie /■ Rclioionswisnenitchaft, 
r.l07, p. 258. - Athen. p. 072. 



316 The Making of a Goddess [cii. 

out of the town and bound among the bushes, and Strabo' tells us 
that in ancient days Samos was called Parthenia, the island of the 
Maiden. At Stymphalus, in remote Arcadia, Pausanias'"' says that 
Hera had three sanctuaries and three surnames : while yet a girl 
she was called Child, married to Zeus she was called Complete 
or Full-Grown (reXeia), separated from Zeus and returned to 
Stymphalus she was called Chera (Widow). Long before her con- 
nection with Zeus, the matriarchal goddess may well have reflected 
the three stages of a woman's life; Teleia, full-grown, does not 
necessarily imply patriarchal marriage. 

Homer himself was dimly haunted by the memory of days 
when Hera was no wife, but Mistress in her own right. Otherwise, 
unless the poet was the lowest of low comedians, what means her 
ceaseless turbulence and the unending unseemly strife between 
the Father of Gods and Men and the woman he cannot even 
beat into submission ? What her urgent insistent tyranny over 
Herakles whom Zeus loves yet cannot protect ? Is the tyrannous 
mistress really made by the Greek housewife even of Homeric 
days in her own image ? The answer is clear : Hera has been 
forcibly married, but she is never really wife, and a wife's submis- 
sion she leaves to the shadowy double of Zeus, who echoed his 
nature and (significant fact) took his name, she who was the real 
Achaean patriarchal double — Dione^ 

Once fairly married, Zeus and Hera became Sharers of one 
Altar (6/xo/3&)/Lttot), and against the conjunction the older women 
divinities are but too often powerless. In the designs* in figs. 88 
and 89 we have a curious instance of the ruthless fashion in 
which the Olympian pair extrude the objects of an ancient local 
cult. In fig. 88 we have a votive relief to the Nymphs of the 
familiar type : three maiden figures linked together. That the 
figures are Nymphs is certain, for above is the inscription, ' To the 
Mistress Nymphs (Kup/at? Nu/i^at?).' The relief, one of a large 

1 Strab. § 637. 

- P. VIII. 22. 2. The sources for the cult of Hera are well collected by 
Mr Farnell in his Cults of the Greek States, p. 211, but with Mr Farnell's main 
thesis ' that her association with Zeus is a primitive factor in the Greek worship of 
Hera' I am still as he then notes (p. 199) completely at issue. 

^ Again acutely observed by H. D. Miiller, Mifthologie d. Gr. Stdmme, pp. 254, 
255, where the identity of Dione and Juno is noted. 

'* These reliefs are now in the Museum at Sofia : there were discovered in all 
ninety-two of the same type. Bull, de Corr. Hell. xxi. 1897, p. 130, fig. 12 ; p. 138, 
fig. 17. 



VI] ' Hera 317 

series found together at Orochak and now in the local Museum 







Fig. 88. 



at Sofia, is of late Roman style. The design in fig. 89 shows 
a theological shift. The two dominant Olympians, of large 




i^ 



FlO. K'.h 



stature to mark their supremacy, occupy the forefront ; they hold 
each an expectant pJiiale for libations ; to them only is sacrifice to 



318 



The Making of a Goddess 



[CH. 



be made. It is they who hold the sceptres. Humbly in the 
background, minished and all but effaced, are the three ancient 
Maidens. The local peasant is conservative ^ and we may hope 
they too had their meed of offering. 

The intrusion of Zeus- and Hera on the local cultus of the 
Nymphs brings to mind a story preserved by Diogenes Laertius'' 
in his Life of Epimenides. Theopompus in his ' Wonderful Things ' 
told how when Epimenides was preparing the sanctuary of the 
Nymphs a voice was heard from heaven saying, ' Epimenides, not 
of the Nymphs, but of Zeus.' Perhaps Epimeuides went further 
than the orthodox Olympian religion could tolerate in the matter 
of the revival of ancient cults. To him, as has been already seen 
(p. 241), was credited the founding of the sanctuary of the 



nF~ '■ .^,, vv 



.."ir- 



'„. .^-t^- 



^* .-Ik :^ 

4 ' ^ "^ 



i^^,. 




f'{'-. 



I 






i<5S 





( ^•■^ 









^^ fAVC 



Fig. 90. 



Semnae ; he introduced ceremonies of purification brought from 
Crete, and wholly alien to Olympian ritual. It was time for Zeus 
to reassert himself. 

1 The survival of the type of the ' Three Sisters ' in mediaeval days has been well 
traced by Miss Eckensteiu, Woman under Monasticism, p. 40 ff. 

- After the above was written Mr A. B. Cook with great kindness and generositj- 
allowed me to read in proof his article on ' Zeus, Jupiter and the Oak,' since pub- 
lished in the Classical Review, 1903 and 1904. Mr Cook believes that the worship 
of Zeus was indigenous in Greece and that Zeus, Poseidon and Hades are three 
forms of one primaeval god. His contention is supported by an immense mass of 
evidence. I am at present unconvinced, but space forbids my entering on the 
controversy here. . 

^ Diog. Laert. Vit. Epim. xi. 



VI] 



Supetyosition of the Ohjmpians 



319 



The conHict of theological conceptions is very clearly seen in 
the design in fig. 90, from a votive reliefs found at Eleusis and 
now in the National Museum at Athens. The general type of the 
desion, which belongs to the class known in English as ' Funeral 
Banquets,' will be discussed more in detail later, when we come to 
hero-worship. For the present it is enough to note that on the 
left side of the relief we have the two Goddesses of Eleusis, the 
old matriarchal couple, seated side by side as equals, on the right 
a patriarchal couple, man and wife, the man reclining at the 
banquet and holding a great rliyton, the wife submissively seated 
by his side. In naming them it is safest at present not to go 
beyond what is written. The artist has inscribed over their heads 
the non-committal words, ' To the God,' and ' To the Goddess.' 

It was not only the Olympian Father Zeus who victoriously 
took over to himself the cult of the Earth-Mother and the Earth- 
Maidens. Even more marked is the triumph of the Olympian 
Son, Apollo^ The design in fig. 91 is from a rather late red- 




FiG. 91. 

figured amphora in the Naples Museum I A wayfarer, possibly 
Orestes, has come to Delphi to consult the god; he finds him 
seated on the very omphalos itself, holding the laurel and the lyre 

' 'E(p.'Apx- I860, pi. A. The 'patriarchal couple' are, I incline to think, rightly 
explained by I)r Svoronos (Journal cVArcMol. et Num. 1901, j). 503) as Asklcpios 
and Hy^'ieia, hut as for my purpose it is not necessary to name them, and as the 
evidence is too detailed to ho resumed here, I prefer not to go beyond the inscription. 

- 1 follow Prof. Kidgeway in holding that Apollo belongs to the immigrant 
Achaean stock, see p. 31, note 1. 

^ Heydemann, Cat. 108. llaoul Kochette, Moii. Ined. pi, 37. 



320 



The Making of a Goddess 



[CH. 



in his hands. So Hermes found him in the prologue to the Ion 

of Euripides^ : 

'To Delphi, where 
Phoebus, on earth's mid navel o'er the world 
EnthrouM, weaveth in eternal song 
The sooth of all that is or is to be.' 

The vase-painter knows quite well that it is really a priestess 
who utters the oracles. Only a priestess can mount the sacred 
tripod, and he paints her so seated, the laurel wreath on her head 
and the sacred taenia in her hand, but he knows also that Apollo 
is by this time Lord of All. 

In the Eumenides of Aeschylus, where the contest is between 
the old angry ghosts, the Erinyes envisaged as merely the spirits 
of the blood feud, and the mild and merciful god, our sympathies 




Ficx. 92. 
are at least in part with the new-comer. But even here, so 
stately and yet so pitiful are the ancient goddesses that our hearts 
are sore for the outrage on their order. And on the vase-painting, 
when we remember that the omphalos is the very seat and symbol 
of the Earth-Mother", that hers was the oracle and hers the 



1 Eur. Ion 5. 

- The evidence for this I have collected elsewhere, see 
Omphalos, J.H.S. 1899, xix. 225. 



Delphika,' B. The 



vi] Superposition of the Ohjuipians 321 

holy oracular snake that Apollo slew, the intrusion is hard to 
bear. 

The triumph of the Olympian order is still more clearly pre- 
sented in the design in fig. 92, from a votive reliefs in the local 
Museum at Sparta. The centre of the design is occupied by the 
omphalos on a low basis. It looks very humble and obscure. At 
either side of it are perched new guardians, the great eagles of 
Olympian Zeus. The story- said that starting from either end of 
the world they met at Pytho, at the omphalos. The birds were 
variously said to be swans or eagles. Neither swans nor eagles 
have anything to do with the Earth-goddess ; they are Ouranian 
eagles for Zeus or swans for Apollo, and, standing over the omphalos, 
they mark the dominion of the Father and the Son. But the 
artist has uttered his meaning still more emphatically. Towering 
over the omphalos is the great figure of Apollo with his lyre. He 
holds out a cup, and libation to him is poured by his sister 
Artemis. The Olympian victory is complete. 

So far we have dealt with the Making of a goddess ; we have 
seen one woman-form take various shapes as Mother and Maiden, 
as duality and trinity ; we have seen these shapes crystallize into 
Olympian divinities as Athene, as Aphrodite, as Hera, and as it 
were resume themselves again into the great monotheistic figure 
of Venus Genetrix. We have noted evidence, very scattered and 
fragmentary, of earlier animal forms of the goddess as bird and 
snake. But it has been obvious enough that the weak point in 
the argument is just this transitional phase. The goddesses, 
when they first come into our ken, are goddesses, fully human and 
lovely in form, figures whose lineaments have been fixed and 
beautified by art, and of mythological rather than of ritual content. 
In a word links are wanting in the transition from ghost or snake 
or bogey to goddess. Two reasons may be suggested. The full 
development of the women divinities seems to have been earlier 
accomplished, the sublimation earlier complete, and hence the 
early phases of that development are more effaced ; and next 
these goddess figures became more completely material for poetic 
treatment. In the Making of a god we catch in some figures the 
process at an earlier stage, and many missing links in the ])assage 
from ghost and snake to Olympian will thereby become manifest. 
' .(. Mitt. 18S7, Taf. XII. - Pint, dc defect, onic. 1. 

11. 2] 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE MAKING OF A GOD. 

' ioa Geo'i N6coT6poi, haAaioyc NUMOyC 
KAGinnACAcGe.' 

Frequently, in his wanderings through Greece, Pansanias 

came upon the sanctuaries of local heroines, and these sanctuaries 

are almost uniformly tombs at which went on the cultus of the 

dead. At Olympiad inside the Altis he noted the Hiiypodameion 

or sanctuary of Hippodameia, a large enclosure surrounded by a 

wall. Into this enclosure once a year women were permitted to 

enter to sacrifice to Hippodameia and do other rites in her 

honour. The tomb of Auge" was still to be seen at Pergamos, 

a mound of earth enclosed by a stone basement and on the top 

the figure of a naked woman. At Leuctra^ in Laconia there was 

an actual temple {va6<;) of Cassandra with an image ; the people 

of the place called her Alexandra, ' Helper of Men.' At Sparta* 

Helen had a sanctuary, and in Rhodes she was worshipped as 

She of the Tree, ' Dendritis,' and to her as Dendritis, if we may 

trust Theocritus'^, maidens brought offerings. At her wedding 

they sing: 

' fair, gracious maideu, the while we chant our lay, 
A wedded wife jirt thou. But we, at dawning of the day, 
Forth to the grassy mead will go, to our old racing place. 
And gather wreaths of odorous flowers, and think upon thy face, 
Again, again, Helen, on thee, as young lambs in the dew 
Think of the milk that fed them and run back to mother ewe. 
For thee the tirst of Maidens shall the lotus creeping low 
Be culled to hang in garlands where the shadowy plane doth grow ; 
To thee where grows the shadowy plane the hrst oil shall be poured, 
Drop by drop from a silver cruse, to hold thy name adored : 
And letters on the bark be wrought, for him who goes to see, 
A message graven Dorian -wise: "Kneel; I am Helen's tree.'" 

1 P. VI. 20. 7. ^ P. VIII. 4. 9. 

3 P. III. 26. 5. ■* P. in. 15. 3. ^ Theocr. Id. xviii. 38. 



CH. VIl] 



Local Heroine-ivorship 



323 



Helen as local heroine had, it would seem, not only a sanctviary 
and a sacred tree but a very ancient image. The design in figs. 
93 and 94 is from a lekythos^ in the 
Louvre, of the kind usually known as 
' proto-Corinthian.' Its style dates it as 
not later than the 7th century B.C., and it 
is our earliest extant monument of ' the 
rape of Helen,' The subject seems to 
have had a certain popularity in archaic 
art, as it occurred on the throne of Apollo 
at Amyclael In the centre of the design 
stands a woman-figure of more than natural 
size. Two men advance against her from 
the right ; the foremost seizes her by the 
wrist. In his left hand he holds a sceptre. 
He is Theseus, and behind him comes 
Peirithoos, brandishing a great sword. To 
the left of Helen are her two brothers, the 

horsemen Kastor and Polydeukes. It is important ^to note that 
Helen is here more image than living woman. Dr'Blinkenberg, 




Fig. 93. 




i<^ 







Fig. 94. 

who rightly interprets the scene as the rape of Helen, says ' ses 
mains levies expriment la surprise et I'effroi,' but since the 
discovery of the early image of the Mycenaean goddess Avith 
uplifted hands'- it will at once be seen that the gesture is hieratic 
rather than human. This early 7th century document suggests 
that ' the rape of Helen ' was originally perhaps the rape of a 
xoanon from a sanctuary, rather than of a Avife from her husband. 

' Inv. C.A. (;i7. PubliHhed by M. L. Couve, Eeviie Arch('olo;iiqiie, 1«98, p. 213, 
figs. 1 and 2, and discussed by Dr Blinkenbuig, 1898, p. 398. 
2 P. III. 18. U. 
'■* Dr S. Wide, ' Mykeniscbe Gcitterbilder und Idole,' A. Mitt. 1901, p. 217, 

PI. XII. 



21—2 



324 The Making of a God [ch. 

Be that as it may, the great dominant hieratic figure on the vase 
is more divine than human. 

For Homer, poet of the immigrant Achaeans, Helen of the old 
order of daughters of the land is a mortal heroine, beautiful and 
sinful, yet in a sense divine. To the modern poet she is altogether 
goddess, for she is Beauty herself: 

'0 Light and Shadow of all things that be, 
Beauty, wild with wreckage like the sea. 

Say, who shall win thee, thou without a name 1 
Helen, Helen, who shall die for thee?' 

Hebe, another local heroine, has at Phlius^ a sacred grove and 
a sanctuary, 'most holy from ancient days.' The goddess of the 
sanctuary was called by the earliest authorities of the place 
Ganymeda, but later Hebe. Her sanctuary was an asylum, and 
this was held to be her greatest honour that ' slaves who took 
refuge there were safe and prisoners released hung their fetters 
on the trees in her grove.' That a sanctuary should be an asylum 
is a frequent note of antiquity. When the immigrant conqueror 
reduces the whole land to subjection, he, probably from super- 
stitious awe, leaves to the conquered their local sanctuary, the 
one place safe from his tyranny. Hebe-Ganymeda, female corre- 
lative of Ganymedes, is promoted to Olympus, but significantly 
she is admitted onh' as cupbearer and wife of Herakles. Olympus 
here as always mirrors human relations. Hera by marriage with 
Zeus is admitted to full patriarchal citizenship, her shadowy double 
Hebe is but her Maid of Honour. 

As a rule then the local heroine remains merely the object of a 
local cult. Where she passed upward to the rank of a real divinity, 
the steps of transition are almost wholly lost. We feel inwardly 
sure that Hera and Aphrodite were once of mere local import, like 
Auge or Iphigeneia, but we lack definite evidence. In the case of 
Athene the local origin, it has been shown (p. 300), is fairly clear. 

The reason why the local heroine failed to emerge to complete 
godhead is sometimes startlingly clear. Her development was 
checked midway by the intrusion of a full-blown goddess of the 
Olympian stock. Near to Cruni in Arcadia Pausanias- saw the 

1 P. II. 13. 3. For Hebe-Ganymeda-Dia and the shift of husbands between hex- 
and Hera see the valuable articles by Mr A. B. Cook, ' Who was the wife of Zeus .•' 
Class. Rev. 1906, pp. 365 and 416. 

- P. VIII. 35. S. 



yii] The Hero as Snake 325 

grave of Callisto. It was a high inound on which grew trees, 
some of them fruit-bearing, some barren. ' On the top of the 
mound,' Pausanias adds, 'is a sanctuary of Artemis with the title 
CalKste.' Nothing could be clearer. Over the tomb of the old 
Bear-Maiden, Callisto, daughter of Lycaon, Artemis the Northerner, 
the Olympian, has superposed her cult, and to facilitate the shift 
she calls herself Galliste, the Fairest. Possibly here, as at Athens 
under the title of Brauronia, she kept up the ancient bear- 
serviced 

The passage from ghost to goddess is for the most part lost 
iu the mists of time, but of the analogous process from ghost to 
god the steps are still in historical times clearly traceable. The 
reason is clear. The intrusion of the patriarchal system, the 
practice of tracing descent from the father instead of the mother, 
tended to check, if it was powerless wholly to stop, the worship 
of eponymous heroines. Conservatism compelled the worship 
of old established heroines, but no fresh canonizations took 
place. The ideal woman of Pericles was assuredly not the stuff 
of which goddesses were made. If we would note the actual 
process of the manufacture of divinity, it is to Aero-worship we 
must turn-. 

The Hero as Snake. 

The design in fig. 95 is from an archaic relief'' of the sixth 
century B.C., now in the local Museum at Sparta. It forms one 
of a series of reliefs found near Sparta, all of which are cast 
approximately in the same type. A male and a female figure are 
.seated side by side on a great throne-like chair. The female 
fijrure holds her veil, the male figure a large cantharus or two- 
handled cup, as if expecting libation. Worshippers of diminutive 

1 For the bear-service of Artemis and the bear dedicated to her, see Miith. tniil 
Mon. Anc. Athens, p. 403. 

2 The materials for the study of hero-worshii^ are well collected in Roscher's 
Lexicon, s.v. Heroes, and for English readers there is an excellent survey in 
Mr W. H. D. House's drcek Votive Ojffriiifis, c. i. In the pa^es that follow 1 confine 
myself for the most part to such aspects of hero-worship as alfect my main arjjtument, 
and to certain evidence from art which seems to me to have been noslected, or 
misunderstood. I must also note that, advisedly, I only deal with the ' Waking of 
a God' in so far as the god developcs out of the hero. The most important and 
far more diflicult (|uestion of the relation between totemism and Kod-makinf,', a 
problem for the solution of which Greek tradition provides but scanty material, 
I leave for the present untouched. It can only be decided by much wider anthropo- 
logical investigation than is within my scope. 

=* A. Mitt. 1H77, pi. XXII. 



326 



The Making of a God 



[CH. 



size approach with offerings — a cock and some object that may 
be a cake, an egg or a fruit. The reliefs are, for the most part, 
uninscribed, but on some of rather later date names are written 




Fig. 95. 

near the figure, and they are the names of mortals, e.g. 'Timocles\' 
It is clear that we have in these monuments representations of 
the dead, but the dead conceived of as half divine, as heroized — 
hence their large size compared with that of their worshipping 
descendants. They are Kpetrrove^, ' Better and Stronger Ones.' 

The artist of the relief in fig. 95 is determined to make his 
meaning clear. Behind the chair, equal in height to the seated 
figures, is a great curled snake, but a snake strangely fashioned. 
From the edge of his lower lip hangs down a long beard ; a 

1 For the 'Timocles' relief and for the whole class in general, see Myth, and 
Mon. Anc. Athens, p. 590, where I have discussed the influence of the typography of 
these hero-reliefs on Attic gravestones. 



vii] The Hero as Snctke 327 

decoration denied by nature. The intention is clear ; he is a 
human snake, the vehicle, the incarnation of the dead man's ghost. 
Snakes lurk about tombs, they are uncanny-looking beasts, and the 
Greeks are not the only people who have seen in a snake the 
vehicle of a ghost. M. Henri Jumod\ in discussing the beliefs of 
the Barongas, notes that among this people the snake is regarded 
as the chikonembo or ghost of a dead man, usually of an ancestor. 
The snake, so regarded, is feared but not worshipped. A free- 
thinker among the Barongas, if bored by the too frequent re- 
appearance of the snake ancestor, will kill it, saying, ' Come now, 
we have had enough of you.' 

Zeus Meilichios, it has been seen (p. 18), was worshipped as a 
snake. If we examine the great snake on his relief in fig. 1 (p. 18) 
it is seen to be also bearded. The beard in this case is not at the 
end of the lip, but a good deal further back. 

The addition of the beard was no doubt mainly due to frank 
anthropomorphism ; the snake is in a transition stage between 
animal and human, and human for the artist means divine. He 
gives the snake a beard to mark his anthropomorphic divinity, 
just as he gave to the bull river-god on coins a human head with 
horns. The farther question arises, ' Was there anything in nature 
that might have acted as a possible suggestion of a beard ? ' An 
interesting answer to this question has been suggested to me by 
an eminent authority on snakes, Dr Hans Gadow, and to him 
I am indebted for the following scientific particulars. 

The snake represented in fig. 1 (p. 18) Dr Gadow believes to be 
the species known as Coelopeltis lacertina. It occurs from Spain 
to Syria and specimens of 6 ft. long are not uncommon. The 
creature's head, according to Dr Gadow, is reproduced with ad- 
mirable fidelity; the name lacertina is due to the lizard-like, 
instead of snake-like, depressed head. Moreover this species is 
really poisonous, but only to its proper prey, e.g. mice, rats, lizards, 
etc., while it is practically harmless to man, on account of the 
position of the poison fangs, which are far back in the mouth 
instead of near the front. This is a somewhat exceptional arrange- 
ment and probably well known to the ancients. In fact the 
Coeloj>eltis lacertina \b a^, snaka with poison that does not ordinarily 
strike. On occasion it could bite a man's hand, i.e. if it opened 
' H. Jumod, Leg Barongas, p. 39G, and see ' Delphika,' J. U.S. xix. 1H<J1), p. 21(;. 



328 



The Making of a God 



[CH. 



its mouth very wide, as wide as a striking cobra. This position of 
the dropped jaw, according to Dr Gadow, is very noticeable and 
must have been observed by the ancients. . The angle of the 
dropped jaw is just that of the beard on the snake in fig. 1 (p. 18). 
It seems possible and even highly probable that the dropped jaw, 
seen at a distance, might have suggested a beard, or that an artist 
representing an actual dropped jaw may have been cojDied by 
another who misinterpreted the jaw into a beard. In any case 
the scheme of the dropped jaw would be ready to hand and would 
help to soften the anomaly of the bearded snaked 

In snake form the hero dwelt in his tomb, and to indicate this 
fact not uncommonly on vase-paintings we have a snake depicted 
on the very grave mound itself The design in fig. 96, from a black- 




Fro. 96 



figured lekythos^ in the Museum at Naples, is a good instance. 
The funeral mound which occupies the centre of the design is, on 
the original vase, white, and on it is painted a black snake ; the 
mound itself is surmounted by a black stele : whether the vase- 
painter regards his snake as painted actually outside the tomb or 
as representing the snake-hero actually resident within, is not 

1 Mr F. M. Cornford kindly points out to me that the bearded snake is not 
unknown to Greek literature. He is one of the many Oav/xara that meet us in the 
life of ApoUonius of Tyana, see Philostr. Vit. Aijoll. iii. 7 and 8. These snakes 
belong to the wonder land of India. 

2 Published and discussed, 'Delphika,' J.H.S. xix. 1899, p. 229, figs. 9 and 10. 



VII] 



The Hero as Snake 



329 



easy to determine. The figure of a man on the left of the tomb 
with uplifted sword points probably to the taking of an oath, it 
may be of vengeance. 

In the curious design in fig. 97, from a kotylos also in the 
Naples Museum^, we have again a funeral mound, again decorated 




Fig. 07. 



with a huge snake, this time represented with dropped jaw and 
beard. The tomb seems to have become a sort of mantic shrine. 
Two men are seated Avatching attentively the portent of the eagle 
and the snake. On the reverse of the vase, to the right, the tomb- 
mound is decorated with a stag, and the portent is an eagle 
devouring a hare. 

Herodotus- notes that among the Libyan tribe of the Nasa- 
mones tombs were used for two purposes, for the taking of oaths 
and for dream oracles. ' In their oaths and in the art of divination 
they observe the following practice : they take oaths by those 
among them who are accounted to be most virtuous and excellent, 
by touching their tombs, and when they divine they regularly 
resort to the monuments of their ancestors, and having made 
supplication they go to sleep, and whatever vision they behold, of 
that they make use.' Herodotus like many travellers was more 
familiar, it would seem, with the customs of foreigners than with 
those of his own people. Hi' notes the two customs as though 
they were alien curiosities, but the practice of swearing on a 



» Cat. 2458. J. U.S. 1H<>9, p. 227, fi^s. 7 and 8. 
rejected a possible mythological interpretation. 
^ Herod, iv. 172. 



I have here discussed and 



330 



The Making of a God 



[CH. 



tomb must have been familiar to the Greeks. The slave in the 
Ghoephori says to Electra^ : 

' Reverencing thy father's tomb Hke to an altar, 
Mine inmost thoughts I speak, doing thy hest.' 

By the hero Sosipolis at Olympia- oaths were taken ' on the 
greatest occasions ' — by Sosipolis who in true hero-fashion was wont 
to appear in snake-form. That these oaths Avere taken on his 
actual tomb we are not told, but the sanctuary of a snake-hero 
can scarcely in its origin have been other than his tomb. Almost 
every hero in Greece had his dream oracle. Later, as the hero 
was conceived of as in human rather than animal shape, the 
connection between hero and snake is loosened, and we get the 
halting, confused theology of Aeneas^ : 

' Doubtful if he should deeixi the ghding snake 
The genius of the place, or if it were 
His father's ministrant.' 



.^^^' 



In fig. 98 we have an altar to a hero found in Lesbos'*, not the old 
primitive grave mound which was the true 
original form, but a late decorative struc- 
ture such as might have served an Olym- 
pian. It is inscribed in letters of Roman 
date, ' The people to Aristandros the hero, 
son of Cleotimos,' and that the service is 
to a hero is further emphasized by the 
snakes sculptured on the top round the 
hollow cup which served for libations. 
There are two snakes ; it is no longer 
realized that the hero himself is a snake, 
but the snake reminiscence clings. 




Fig. 98. 



If the question be raised, ' why did the 
Greeks imacre the dead hero as a snake ? ' 
no very certain or satisfactory answer can be offered. Aelian' in 
his treatise on 'The Nature of Animals' says that the backbooe 
of a dead man when the marrow has decayed turns into a snake. 
The chance, sudden apparition of a snake near a dead body may 

1 Aesch. Choeph. 105. - P. vi. 20. 3. ^ ygrg. Aen. v. 95. 

^ A. Conze, Reise in der Insel Lesbos, PI. iv. fig. 5, p. 11. 
5 Ael. Hist. An. i. 51. 



vit] The Hero as Snalce 331 

have started the notion. Plutarch' tells how, when the body of 
Cleomenes was impaled, the people, seeing a great snake wind 
itself about his head, knew that he was ' more than mortal ' 
(KpeLTTovo'i). Of course, by the time of Cleomenes, the snake was 
well established as the vehicle of a hero, but some such coinci- 
dence may very early have given rise to this association of ideas. 
Plutarch adds that ' the men of old time associated the snake 
most of all beasts with heroes.' They did this because, he says, 
philosophers had observed that ' when part of the moisture of the 
marrow is evaporated and it becomes of a thicker consistency it 
produces serpents.' 

The snake was not the only vehicle. As has already been 
noted (p. 304), the spirit of the dead could take shape as a human- 
headed bird or even perhaps, if a bird happened to perch on 
a tomb, as a mere natural hoopoe or swallow. Between the bird- 
souls and the snake-souls there is this difference. So far as we 
know, the human-headed bird was purely a creature of mythology, 
whereas the bearded human snake was the object of a cult. Also 
the bird-soul, though sometimes male, tends, on the whole, to be a 
woman ; the snake, even when not bearded, is usually the vehicle 
of a male ghost ; as such he is the incarnation rather of the hero 
than the heroine. So close is the connection that it gave rise to 
the popular expression ' Speckled hero,' which arose, Photius'^ 
explains, because snakes which are speckled are called heroes. 
Of these snake-heroes and their cultus Homer knows absolutely 
nothing, but the belief in them is essentially primitive and 
recrudesces with other popular superstitions. 

' Plut. Vit. Cleom. 39. 

2 Phot. s.v. ijpws TTOLKtXos. After Christian clays the notion started by the 
Olympian religion that the snake was bad was strengthened by association with 
the 'old serpent' of Semitic mythology. Mr R. C. Bosanquet kindly drew my 
attention to a curious survival of the belief that a bad soul takes the form of a 
snake in the account of the life and miracles of the fifth century saint, St Marcellus 
(Boll. Acta Sdiictonim 1 — 3, vol. lxiii. of the whole series, pp. 25!) and '207). 
It was related that a certain matron of noble family, but bad character, died and 
was buried with great pomp. 'Ergo ad consumendum ejus cadaver coepit serpens 
immanissimus fretjuentare, et, ut dicam clarius, mulieri, cujus membra bestia 
devorabat, ipse draco factus est sepultura.' St Marcellus subdued the snake by 
striking it thrice with his staff and putting his prayer-book on its liead. To the 
present day among the Greeks an unbaptized child, who is not yet (juito human 
{XpL(TTiau6s), is sometimes spoken of as a snake-monster (5paKos) and is apt to 
disaiipear in snake form. For the opaKoi see Abbott, Macedonian Folklore, p. '201. 



332 The Making of a God [ch. 



The Cultus-Titles. 

The great snake, later worshipped as Zeus Meilichios, was, we 
have already seen (p. 21), not Zeus himself, but an under- 
world being addressed by the title Meilichios, gracious, kindly, 
easy to be intreated. It will now be evident that his snake form 
marks him as the vehicle or incarnation of a ghost, a local hero. 
He was only one of a large class of local divinities who were 
invoked not by proper names but by adjectival epithets, de- 
scriptive of their nature, epithets which gradually crystallized 
into cultus-titles. That these titles were really adjectival is 
shown sometimes by the actual word, e.g. Meilichios, which re- 
tains its adjectival sense, sometimes by the 'fact that it is taken on 
as a distinguishing epithet by an Olympian, e.g. Zeus-Amphiaraos. 
These cultus-titles mark an important stage in the making of a 
god and must be examined somewhat more in detail. 

Herodotus^ in discussing the origins of Greek theology makes 
the following significant statement : ' The Pelasgians formerly 
made all sorts of sacrifice to the gods and invoked them in prayer, 
as I know from Avhat I heard in Dodona, but they gave to none 
of them either name or eponym, for such they had not yet heard : 
they addressed them as gods because they had set all things in 
order and ruled over all things. Then after a long lapse of time 
they learnt the names of the other gods which had come from 
Egypt and much later that of Dionysos. As time went on they 
inquired of the oracle at Dodona about these names, for the 
oracle there is held to be the most ancient of all the oracles in 
Greece and was at that time the only one. When therefore the 
Pelasgians inquired at Dodona whether they should adopt the 
names that came to them from the barbarians, the oracle or- 
dained that they should use them. And from that time on they 
sacrificed to the gods making use of their names.' 

If the gods were in these primitive days invoked in prayer, 
some sort of name, some mode of address they must have 
had. Is it not at least possible that the advance noted by 
Herodotus is the shift from mere cultus-title, appropriate to any 

^ Herod, ii. 51 deovs on Kbcrfiip divTes. Herodotus according to the fashion of 
his day derives diol from the root de, to put in order. 



vii] The Cidtus-Titles 333 

and every divinity, to actual proper name which defined and 
crystallized the god addressed ? Any and every hero or divinity 
might rightly be addressed as Meilichios, but a single individual 
personality is caught and crystallized in the proper name Zeus. 
When an epithet lost its adjectival meaning, as is the case with 
Amphiaraos, then and not till then did it denote an individual 
god. Apollo, Artemis, Zeus himself may have been adjectival 
to begin with, mere cultus epithets, but their meaning once lost 
they have become proper and personal. 

It is significant that the shift is said to have taken place 
owing to an oracle at Dodona. There, accepting Prof. Ridge way's* 
theory, was the first clash of Pelasgian and Achaean, there Zeus 
and his shadow-wife Dione displaced the ancient Earth-Mother 
with her dove-priestesses ; there perhaps the Pelasgians with their 
' nameless ' gods, their heroes and heroines addressed by cultus 
epithets, met and mingled with the worshippers of Zeus the 
Father and Dione the wife, and learnt to fix the personalities 
of their formless shifting divinities, learnt the lesson not from 
the ancient civilized Egyptians but from the northern ' bar- 
barians.' 

The word hero itself is adjectival. A gloss in Hesychius"'^ tells 
us that by hero was meant ' mighty,' ' strong,' ' noble,' ' venerable.' 
In Homer the hero is the strong man alive, mighty in battle ; in 
cultus the hero is the strong man after death, dowered with a greater, 
because a ghostly, strength. The dead are, as already noted, Kpeor- 
rove<;, ' Better and Stronger Ones.' The avoidance of the actual 
proper name of a dead man is an instructive delicate decency and 
lives on to-day. The newly dead becomes, at least for a time, 
' He ' or ' She ' ; the actual name is felt too intimate. It is a 
part of the tendency in all primitive and shy souls, a tendency 
already noted (p. 214), to remove a little whatever is almost too 
close, to call your friend ' the kind one,' or ' the old one,' or ' the 
black one,' and never name his silent name. Of course the 
delicate instinct soon crystallizes into definite ritual prescription, 

1 Prof. IlidKC'way, Earlij Age of Greece, vol. i. p. H'S'.). Aristotle distinctly states 
that the region round Dodona was 'ancient (jreece,' see Ar. Meteor, i. 1'2. 9 avT-rj 5t 
{i) 'EWas q apxaio-) iarlv rj irepl ttjj/ Awoufrji' Kal t6v 'Axf^'?oi'...t^Kovi> yap ol ^AXot 
ivTavOa. Kal o'l KaXov/xevoi rdre /xiw VpatKol vvv 5^ "E\\T)Vfs, see Prof. Pmy, -J. U.S. xv. 
p. 217, and Pietschmer, F.lnleitniKj, \). 250. 

" Hesych. s.v. ijpus- owards, iaxvpoi, yepvaios, cre/itcis. 



334 The Making of a God [ch. 

and gathers about it the practical cautious utilitarianism of 
de tnortuis nil nisi bene. 

It is often said that the Greeks were wont to address their 
heroized dead and underworld divinities by ' euphemistic ' titles, 
Eumenides for Erinyes, xPW^^y ' Good One,' when they meant 
' Bad One.' Such is the ugly misunderstanding view of scholiasts 
and lexicographers. But a simpler, more human explanation lies 
to hand. The dead are, it is true, feared, but they are also loved, 
felt to be friendly, they have been kin on earth, below the earth 
they will be kind. But in primitive days it is only those who 
have been kin who will hereafter be kind ; the ghosts of your 
enemies' kin will be unkind ; if to them you apply kindly epithets 
it is by a desperate euphemism, or by a mere mechanical usage. 

Of such euphemism Homer ^ has left us a curious example. 
Zeus would fain remind the assembled gods of the blindness and 
fatuity of mortal man : 

' Then spake the Sire of Gods and Men, and of the Blameless One, 
Aigisthos, he bethought him, whom Agamemnon's son, 
Far-famed Orestes, slew.' 

Aigisthos, traitor, seducer, murderer, craven, is ' the Blameless 
One.' The outraged morality of the reader is in instant protest. 
These Olympians, these gods 'who live at ease,' go too far. 

The epithets in Homer are often worn ver}^ thin, but here, 
once the point is noted-, it is manifest that a^vfiwv, 'the Blame- 
less One,' is a title perfectly ajDpropriate to Aigisthos as a dead 
hero. Whatever his life on the upper earth, he has joined the 
company of the Kpeirrove^;, ' the Stronger and Better Ones.' The 
epithet d/xv/jiwv in Homer is applied to individual lieroes, to a 
hero's tomb-', to magical, half-mythical peoples like the Phaea- 
cians and Aethiopians"* who to the popular imagination are half 
canonized, to the magic island^ of the god Helios, to the imaginarj- 
half-magical Good Old King*'. It is used also of the 'convoy''' 
sent by the gods, which of course is magical in character ; it is 
never, I believe, an epithet of the Olympians themselves. There 

1 Horn. Od. I. 29. 

^ I owe this explanation of dtxvfj.uv entirely to Mr Gilbert Murray. Since the 
publication of Dr Erazer's Origin of tlie Kinijshi}} it has become further clear that 
the magical power of the dead king was only a prolongation of his living prerogative. 

3 Hom. Od. XXIV. 80. •* II. i. 423. 

5 Od. XII. 2G1. 6 Od. XIX. 109. " 11. vi. 171. 



vii] The 'blameless' Aigisthos 335 

is about the word a touch of what is magical and demonic rather 
than actually divine. 

Homer himself is ignorant of, or at least avoids all mention of, 
the dark superstitions of a primitive race ; he knows nothing at 
least ostensibly of the worship of the dead, nothing of the cult at 
his tomb, nothing of his snake-shape ; but Homer's epithets came 
to him already crystallized and came from the underlying stratum 
of religion which was based on the worship of the dead. And here 
comes in a curious complication. To Homer, though he calls him 
mechanically, or if we like ' euphemisticall}^,' the ' Blameless One,' 
Aigisthos is really bad, though not perhaps so black as Aeschylus 
painted him. But was he bad in the eyes of those who first 
made the epithet ? The story of Aigisthos is told hy the mouth 
of the conquerors. Aigisthos is of the old order, of the primitive 
population, there before the coming of the family of Agamemnon. 
Thyestes, father of Aigisthos, had been banished' from his home; 
Aigisthos is reared as an alien and returns to claim his own. 
Clytaemnestra too was of the old order, a princess of the primitive 
dwellers in the land, regnant in her own right. Agamemnon leaves 
her, leaves her signiticantly in the charge of a bard-, one of those 
bards pledged to sing the glory of the conquering Achaeans, 
and the end is inevitable : she reverts to the prince of the old stock, 
Aigisthos, to whom we may even imagine she was plighted before 
her marriage to Agamemnon. Menelaos in like fashion marries a 
princess of the laud and his too are the sorrows of the king- 
consort. The tomb of Aigisthos was shown to Pausanias^. We 
hear of no cult ; possibly under the force of hostile epic tradition it 
dwindled and died, but in old days we may be sure ' the Blame- 
less One ' had his meed of service at Argos, and the epithet itself 
remains as eternal witness. 

Salmoneus to the Achaean mind was scarcely more ' Blameless ' 
than Aigisthos and yet he too bears the epithet. In the Nekuia-* 
C)dysseus says : 

' Then of the throng of women-folk first Tyro I did see, 
Child of Saltuoueu.s, Blameless One, a noble sire he.' 

' Aesch. Chopph. l'>fiP>. Prof. Ridgeway, Early Acie of Greece, vol. i. ]). 07, has 
poniteil out that Agamemnon and Menelaos were ne\v-comer.s, and that llelen was 
of the indigenous stock. I venture to suggest that Aigistlios and Clytaemnestra 
belong also to the ' Pelasgian' stratum. 

'^ Horn. Od. III. 267. =* P. ii. Ki. 7. •* Hom. (hi xi. '235. 



336 The Making of a God [ch. 

The case of Salmoneus is highly significant. He too belongs to 
the old order, as indeed do all the Aeolid figures connected with 
the group of dead heroines, and more, in his life he was in violent 
opposition to the new gods. To Hesiod^ he is 'the Unjust One' 
(uSlko^). He even dared to counterfeit the thunder and lightning 
of Zeus, and Zeus enraged slew him with a thunderbolt. He is the 
very mirror of the picture drawn by Vergil- of the insolent king: 

' Through the Greek folk, midway in Elis town 
In triumph went he ; for himself, mad man, 
Honours divine he claimed.' 

To every worshipper of the new order his crime must have seemed 
heinous and blasphemous, but among his own people he was 
glorious before death and probably 'Blameless' after. 

The case of Tityos, Son of Earth, presents a close parallel, 
though Tityos never bore the title of ' Blameless.' To the orthodox 
worshipper of the Olympians he Avas the vilest of criminals ; as 
such Homer^ knew him : 

'For he laid hands on Leto, the famous bride of Zeus, 
What time she fared to Pytho through the glades of Panopeus.' 

And for this his sin he lay in Hades tortured for ever. This is 
from the Olympian point of view very satisfactory and instructive, 
but when we turn to local tradition Tityos is envisaged from 
quite another point of view. Strabo^ when he visited Panopeus, 
learnt that it was the fabled abode of Tityos. He reminds us 
that it Avas to the island of Euboea that, according to Horner^, the 
Phaeacians conducted fair-haired Rhadamanthys that he might 
see Tityos, Son of Earth. We wonder for a moment why the 
just Rhadamanthys should care to visit the criminal. Homer 
leaves us in doubt, but Strabo makes the mystery clear. On 
Euboea, he says, they show a ' cave called Elarion from Elara who 
was mother to Tityos, and a hero-shrine of Tityos, and some kind 
of honours are mentioned which are paid to him.' One ' blameless ' 

1 Hes. frg. ap. Scbol. Find. Pijth. iv. 253. 

2 Verg. Aen. vi. 585. Hygiu. Fab. 61. For the whole subject of Salmoneus see 
Dr Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, pp. 197 aud 204. It will 
later (Chap, xi.) be shown that the canonical Hades was peopled by these heroes of 
an earlv racial stratum. 

3 Od. XI. 576. -■ Strab. ix. 3 § 423. s Od. vii. 323. 



vn] EiqjJiemistlc Epithets 337 

hero visits another, that is all. Golden-haired Rhadamanthys 
found favour with the fair-haired Achaeans ; but for Tityos, the 
son of Earth, there is no place in the Northern Elysium. 

We may take it then that the ' euphemistic ' epithets Avere 
applied at first in all simplicity and faith to heroes and under- 
world gods by the race that worshipped them. The devotees 
of the new Achaean religion naturally regarded the heroes and 
saints of the old as demons. Such was in later days the charitable 
view taken by the Christian fathers of the Olympian gods in their 
turn. All the activities that were uncongenial, all the black side 
of things, were carefully made over by the Olympians to the 
divinities they had superseded. Only here and there the un- 
conscious use of a crystallized epithet like ' Blameless ' lets out 
the real truth. The ritual prescription that heroes should be 
worshipped by night, their sacrifice consumed before dawn, no 
doubt helped the conviction that as they loved the night their 
deeds were evil. Their ritual too was archaic and not lacking in 
savage touches. At Daulis^ Pausanias tells of the shrine of a 
hero-founder. It was evidently of great antiquity, for the people 
of the place were not agreed as to who the hero was ; some said 
Phocos, some Xanthippos. Service was done to him every day, 
and when animal sacrifice was made the Phocians poured the 
blood of the victim through a hole into the grave ; the flesh was 
consumed on the spot. Such plain-spoken ritual would go far to 
promote the notion that the hero was bloodthirsty. 

Sometimes a ritual prescription marks clearly the antipathy 
between old and new, between the hero and the Olympian. 
Pausanias- describes in detail the elaborate ceremonial observed 
in sacrificing to Pelops at Olympia. The hero had a large 
temenos containing trees and statues and surrounded by a stone 
wall, and the entrance, as was fitting for a hero, was towards the 
west. Sacrifice was done into a pit and the victim was a black 
ram. Pausanias ends his account with the significant words: 
' Whoever eats of the flesh of the victim sacrificed to Pelops, 
whether he be of Elis or a stranger, may not enter the temple of 
Zeus! But we are glad U) know from Pindar^ that no spiteful 



1 P. X. 4. 10. - P. V. 13. 3. 

^ Pind. Ol. I. 00 schol. ad loc. 



H. 



22 



338 The Making of a God [ch. 

ritual prescription of the 01ymj)ian could dim the splendour of the 
local hero : 

' In goodly streams of flowing blood outpoured 
Upon his tomb, beside Alpheios' ford, 

Now hath he still his share ; 
Frequent and full the throng tliat worship there.' 

The scholiast comments on the passage : ' Some say that it was 
not (merely) a tomb but a sanctuary of Pelops and that the 
followers of Herakles sacrificed to him before Zeus.' 

At yet another great pan hellenic centre there is the memory, 
though more faded, of the like superposition of cults. The 
scholiast on Pindar^ says that the contest at Nemea was of the 
nature of funeral games {i-TrLTacfiLO'i) and that it was in honour of 
Archemoros, but that later, after Herakles had slain the Nemean 
lion, he ' took the games in hand and put man}" things to rights 
and ordered them to be sacred to Zeus.' 

More commonly there is between the Olympian and the hero 
all appearance of decent friendliness. A compromise is effected ; 
the main ritual is in honour of the Olympian, but to the hero is 
offered a preliminary sacrifice. A good instance of this procedure 
is the worship of Apollo at Amyclae- superposed on that of the 
local hero Hyakinthos. The great bronze statue of Apollo stood 
on a splendid throne, the decorations of which Pausanias describes 
in detail. The image itself was rude and ancient, the lower part 
pillar- shaped, but for all that the god was a new-comer. ' The 
basis of the image was in form like an altar, and they say 
that Hyakinthos was buried in it, and at the festival of the 
Hyakinthia before the burnt sacrifice {dvaias:) to Apollo, they 
devote offerings {ivayi^ovaiv) to Hyakinthos into this altar through 
a bronze door.' 

Apollo and Hyakinthos established a modus vivendi. Apollo 
instituted his regular Olympian sacrifices {Ovcriai) and left to 
Hyakinthos his underworld offerings {evay'iafxara). But not every 
Olympian was so successful. Ritual is always tenacious. So too 
at Delphi, Apollo may seat himself on the omphalos, but he is 
still forced to utter his oracles through the mouth of the 'priestess 

^ Schol. ad byp. Nrin. '0 d7tt;j' {tQu Xe/uecoc) eTnTd(pLos eirl ' ApxefJ-opui . . .varepov 
de viKrjcras 'iipaK\TJs...iTrefj.€\ridr) rod dyuivos to. ttoWix dvopducrd/j.ei'o? Kal Atos dvai 
lepbv ivofioderrjcre. 

- P. HI. ly. 3. 



vii] Heroes and Oli/mjnans 339 

of Gaia. Zeus, we have seen, arrogated to himself the title of 
Meilichios ; he had the old snake reliefs dedicated to him, but he 
was powerless to change the ritual of the hero, and had to content 
himself, like an underworld god, with holocausts. All that he 
could do was to emphasize the untruth that he, not the hero, was 
Meilichios, Easy to be intreated. 

All that could be effected by theological animus was done. 
It has been seen (p. 9) how in the fable of Babrius the hero- 
ancestor is positively forbidden to give good things, and meekly 
submits ; and, long before Babrius, the blackening process had set 
in. The bird-chorus in Aristophanes^ tells of the strange sights 
it has seen on earth : 

' We know of an uncanny spot, 

Very dark, where the candles are not; 

There to feast wath the heroes men go 

By day, but at evening, oh no ! 

For the night time is risky you know. 
If the hero Orestes should meet with a mortal by night, 
He'd strip him and beat him and leave him an elegant sight.' 

Orestes was of course a notable local thief, but the point of the 
joke is the ill-omened character of a hero. The scholiast says that 
' heroes are irascible and truculent to those they meet and possess 
no power over what is beneficial.' He cites Menander as his 
authority, but adds on his own account that this explains the 
fact that ' those who go past hero-shrines keep silence.' So 
easy is it to read a bad meaning into a reverent custom. 
So possessed are scholiasts and lexicographers by the Olympian 
prejudice that, even when the word they explain is dead against 
a bad interpretation, they still maintain it. Hesychius'-, explaining 
KpeLTTova<i, ' Better or Stronger Ones,' says ' they apply the title 
to heroes, and they seem to be a bad sort of persons ; it is on this 
account that those who pass hero-shrines keep silence lest the 
heroes should do them some harm.' Among gods, as among 
mortals, one rule holds good : the king can do no wrong and the 
conquered no right. 

' Ar. Av. 1482, schol. ad loc. Athonaeus (xi. 4, p. 401) jjives the same account of 
the character of heroes : xi^^sTroLis yaf) kuI irXrjKTas roi/s ijpuas co^uij'oi'crt. 
- Hesych. s.v. Kpelrrovas. 



00 



340 The Making of a God [ch. 

ASKLEPIOS AND THE HeROES OF HEALING, 

Heroes, like the ghosts from which they sprang, had of course 
theii' black angry side, but, setting aside the prejudice of an 
Olympianized literature, it is easy to see that in local cultus they 
would tend rather to beneficence. The ghost you worship and 
who by your worship is erected into a hero is your kinsman, and 
the ties of kinship are still strong in the world below. ' In almost 
all West African districts,' says Miss Mary Kingsley\ 'is a class of 
spirits called " Well-disposed Ones " and this class is clearly 
differentiated from " Them," the generic term for non-human 
spirits. These " Well-disposed Ones " are ancestors and they do 
what they can to benefit their particular village or family fetish 
who is not a human spirit or ancestor.' So it was with the Greek; 
he was careful not to neglect or offend his local hero, but on the 
whole he relied on his benevolence : 

'When a man dies we all begin to say 
The sainted one has passed away, he has "fallen asleep," 
Blessed therein tliat he is vexed no more. 
And straight with funeral offerings we do sacrifice 
As to a god and pour libations, bidding 
Him send good things up here from down below-.' 

The cult of heroes had in it more of human ' tendance ' than of 
demonic ' aversion,' 

The hero had for his sphere of beneficence the whole circle 
of human activities. Like all primitive divinities he was of 
necessity a god-of-all-work ; a primitive community cannot afford 
to departmentalize its gods. The local hero had to help his 
family to fight, to secure fertility for their crops and for them- 
selves, act as oracle when the community was perplexed, be ready 
for any emergency that might arise, and even on occasion he 
must mend a broken jug. But most of all he was adored as 
a Healer, As a Healer he rises very nearly to the rank of an 
Olympian, but through the gentleness of his office he keeps a 
certain humanity that prevents complete deification, A typical 
instance of the Hero-Healer is the god Asklepios, 

We conceive of Asklepios as he is figured in many a Greek 
and Graeco-Roman statue, a reverend bearded god, somewhat of 

1 West African Studies, p. 132. ^ ^j^._ Tagenist. frg. 1. 



VIl] 



Heroes of HeaJing 



341 



the type of Zeus, but characterized by the staff on which he leans 
and about which is twined a snake. The snake, our hand-books 
tell us, is the ' symbol of the healing art,' and hence the attribute 
of Asklepios, god of medicine. 

The design in fig. 99, from a votive reliefs found in the 
Asklepieion and now in the National Museum at Athens, gives 




M\ ■* 



,-*>,. ^- 1," -.*i> '■ '^ •'■ 



Fig. 99. 

cause for reflection. The god himself stands in his familiar 
attitude, waiting the family of worshippers who approach with 
offerings. A little happy honoured boy is allowed to lead the 
procession bringing a sheep to the altar. Behind the god is 
his attribute, a huge coiled snake, his head erect and level witJi the 
god he is. Take away the human Asklepios and the scene is yet 
complete, complete as on the Meilichios relirt' in Hg. 2, the great 
hero snake and his worshippers. 

1 Cat. 1407, from a photograph. For permission to publish this relief and those 
in figs. 100, 1(W, ]01, my grateful thanks are due to Mr Kabbadias, Ephor of 
Antiquities at Athens. 



342 



The Mcikhig of a God 



[CH. 



The relief in fig. 99 is under a foot in length, the offering 
probably of some poor man who clung to his old faith in the 
healing snake-hero. It forces us in its plain-spoken simplicity 
to face just the fact that the dedicator of the next reliefs 
(fig. 100) is so anxious to conceal. The second relief is the 




Fig. 100. 

offering of a rich man, the figures are about half life-size ; it was 
found in the same Asklepieion on the S. slope of the Acropolis. 
Asklepios no longer stands citizen-fashion leaning on his staff: he 
is seated in splendour, and beside him is coiled a very humble 
attributive snake. Behind are two figures, probably of a son and 
a daughter, and they all three occupy a separate chapel aloof from 
their human worshippers. 

In token of his humble birth as the ghost of a mortal the snake 
always clings to Asklepios, but it is not the only evidence. An 
essential part of his healing ritual was always and everywhere the 
ijKoi/jir}(n<;", the 'sleeping in' his sanctuary. The patient who 
came to be cured must sleep and in a dream the god either 
healed him or revealed the means of healing. It was the dream 



duo. 



1 Cat. 1377, from a photograph. 

- For the whole subject of eyKoi/nriffis see L. Deubner, De Incubatione capitula 



vn] AsA'leplos 343 

oracle sent by Earth herself that Apollo the Olympian came to 
supersede. All the strange web of human chicanery that was 
woven round the dream cure it would here be irrelevant to 
examine : only the simple fact need be noted that the prescribed 
ritual of sleep was merely a survival of the old dream oracle of 
the hero. It was nowise peculiar to Asklepios. When men came 
to the beautiful little sanctuary of Amphiaraos- at Oropus they 
purified themselves, sacrificed a ram, and spreading the skin under 
them they went to sleep ' awaiting a revelation in a dream.' 

The dream oracle remained always proper to the earth-born 
heroes ; we hear of no one sleeping in the precinct of Zeus, or of 
Apollo, and the belief in the magic of sleep long outlasted the 
service of the Olympians. To-day year by year on the festival of 
the Panagia a throng of sick from the islands round about make 
their pilgrimage to Tenos, and the sick sleep in the Church and in 
the precinct and are healed, and in the morning is published the 
long list of miraculous cures (Oavfiara). It is only the truth and 
the true gods that lived. The Panagia has taken to herself all 
that was real in ancient faith, in her are still incarnate the 
Mother and the Maid and Asklepios the Saviour. Like most 
primitive faiths the belief in the dream cure appealed to some- 
thing very deep-down and real, however misunderstood and per- 
verted, something in the secret bidding of nature that said, that 
always will say : 

'Sleep Heart, a little free 

From thoughts that kill. 
Nothing now hard to thee 

Or good or ill. 
And when the shut eyes see 

Sleep's mansions fill, 
Night might bring that to be 

Day never will.' 

The worship of Asklepios, we know from the evidence of an 
inscription'', was introduced at Athens about 421 B.C. : it was still 
no doubt something of a new excitement when Aristophanes 
wrote his Pliitus. But Athens was not left till 421 B.C. without 
a Hero-Healer. Asklepios came to Athens as a full-blown god, 
came first from Thossaly, where he was the rival of A[)()llo, and 

1 Eur. Iph. in T. 1261. "■ P. i. 34. o. 

' A. Mitt. 18113, p. 2.^0. The introduction of the healer of Epidfturos may have 
been connected with the great plague at Athenn. 



344 The Making of a God [ch. 

finally from his great sanctuary at Epidauros, and, when he came, we 
have definite evidence that his cult was superimposed on that of 
a more ancient hero. 'Affihated' is perhaps the juster word, for 
when a hero from without took over the cult of an indigenous 
hero there is no clash of ritual as in the case of an Olympian, no 
conflict between Ova-iat and ivayia-fjLol; both heroes alike are 
content with the simple offering of the pelanos. 

In the course of the ' Enneakrounos ' excavations Dr Dorpfeld 
came upon a small sanctuary consisting of a precinct, an altar, and 
a well^ The precinct wall, the well and the conduit leading to it 
were clearly, from the style of their masonry, of the date of 
Peisistratos. Within and around the precinct were votive offerings 
that pointed to the worship of a god of healing, reliefs repre- 
senting parts of the human body, breasts and the like, a man 
holding a huge leg marked with a varicose vein, reliefs of the 
usual ' Asklepios ' type, and above all votive snakes. Had there 
been no inscriptions the precinct could have been at once claimed 
as 'sacred to Asklepios,' and we should have been left with the 
curious problems, ' Why had Asklepios two precincts, one on the 
south, one on the west of the Acropolis ; and, if the god had 
already a shrine on the west slope in the days of Peisistratos, why 
did he trouble to make a triumphant entry into Athens on tlie 
south slope in 421 B.C.?' 

Happily we are left in no such dilemma. On a stele found in 
the precinct we have the following inscription-: ' Mnesiptoleme on 
behalf of Dikaiophanes dedicated (this) to Asklepios Amynos.' 
If the inscription stood alone, we should probably decide that 
Asklepios was worshipped in the precinct under the title of 
Amynos, the Protector. Whatever the original meaning of the 
word Asklepios — and we may conjecture it was merely a cultus- 
title — it soon became a proper name, and could therefore easil}' 
be associated with an adjectival epithet. 

A second inscription^ happily makes it certain that Amynos 
was not merely an adjective, but an adjectival title of a person 
distinct from Asklepios. It runs as follows : ' Certain citizens 

1 A. Koerte, 'Bezirk eines Heilgottes,' A. Mitt. 1893, p. 237, aud 1896, p. 311. 
- Koerte, op. cit. "MfrjanrToXeini] vTrep AiKaLocpdvovs 'Acr/cXijTrtw 'A/JLi'ivio avid-qKe. 
3 Koerte, op. cit. dvdpes diKaioL 'Ye[y6v]aai irepi ra kolvo. tQv dpyewvuiv rov Afxvvov 
Kai Tov 'A<TK\T]Triov Kal toO Ae^ioi'os iiraiveaai kt\. 



Yii] Amynos and Dexion 345 

held it just to commemorate concerning" the common weal of the 
members of tiie thiasos of Amynos and of Asklepios and of Dexion.' 
Here we have the names of three personalities manifestly separate 
and enumerated in significant order. We know Asklepios and 
most fortunately Dexion. The author of the Etymologicon 
Magnum^, in explaining the word Dexion, says : ' The title was 
given by the Athenians to Sophocles after his death. They say 
that when Sophocles was dead the Athenians, wishing to give 
him added honours, built him a hero-shrine and named him 
Dexion, the Receiver, from his reception of Asklepios — for he 
received the god in his own house and set up an altar to him,' 
For the heroization of Sophocles we have earlier evidence than 
the Etymologicon Magnum. The historian Istros- (3rd cent. B.C.) 
is quoted as saying that the Athenians ' on account of the man's 
virtue passed a vote that yearly sacrifice should be made to him.' 

It seems an extraordinary story, but, if we do not press too 
hard the words of the panegyrist, the explanation is natural 
enough. Sophocles was not exactly canonised ' because of his 
virtue.' He became a hero, officially, because he had officially 
received Asklepios, and the ' Receiver ' of a god, like the ' Founder' 
of a town, had a right to ritual recognition. ' Dexion ' is the 
Receiver of the god, and from the fact that the inscription Avith 
his name is set up in the little precinct on the west slope of 
the Acropolis we may be sure his worship went on there. It was 
in that little precinct, we may conjecture, that he served as priest. 
This conjecture is made almost certain by the fact that a later 
inscription^ (1st cent. B.C.), with a dedication to Amynos and 
Asklepios, is dated by the priesthood of a ' Sophocles,' probably a 
descendant of the poet. Sophocles as a hero was not a success, 
probably he was too alive and human as a poet ; he was in his 
own precinct completely submerged by the god he ' received.' 

The theological history of the little precinct is quite clear. 
The inscription preserves the ritual order of precedence. The 
sanctuary began, not later than Peisistratos, as an Amyneion, 
.shrine of a local hero worshipped under the title of Amynos, 
Protector. At some time, probably owing to the recent pestilence 

' F.tym. Mag. s.v. Ac^iw;/. It .seems jiossible that by the o'lKia in wliicli Sophocles 
received AsklepioH Ih meant the Amyneion. 
■^ Istr. fry. .51. 
•* Koerte, op. cit. iirl ie/)^ws —o(jiok\(ovs rod 'I'lKwtov. 



346 The MaUiig of a God [ch. 

which the local hero had failed to avert, it was thought well to 
affiliate a Healer-god who had attained enormous prestige in 
the Peloponnesus. The experiment was quietly and carefully 
tried in the little Amyueion before the foundation of the great 
Asklepieion on the south slope. It was a very simple matter. 
A sacred snake would be sent for' from Epidauros, to join the 
local snake of Amynos. Both were snakes, both were healers ; 
the same offerings served for both, the votive limbs, the pelanoi. 
Sophocles the human Receiver, who had introduced Asklepios in 
due course, naturally enough dies, and a third healing hero is 
added to the list. Dexion fades, and Asklepios gradually effaces 
Amynos and takes his name as a ceremonial title. 

Because Athens alone is really alive to us, because we know 
Sophocles as human poet, Asklepios as divine Healer, the case of 
Amynos, Asklepios, Sophocles seems specially vital and convincing- 
But we must take it only as one instance of the ladder from 
earth to heaven that had its lowest rungs planted in every village 
scattered over Greece — a ladder that reached sometimes, but not 
always or even often, up to high Olympus itself Whether a 
local hero became a god depended on a multitude of chances and 
conditions, the clue to which is lost. If a local hero became 
famous beyond his own parish the Olympian religion made every 
effort to meet him half-way. Herakles was of the primitive 
Pelasgian^ stock. His name, if the most recent etymology'' be 
accepted, means only tJte young dear Hero — the Hero ^;a?' ex- 
cellence. No pains were spared to affiliate him. He is allowed 
the Olympian burnt sacrifice ^ he is passed through the folds of 
Hera's robe to make him her child by adoption ^ he is married in 
Olympus to Hebe, herself but newly translated, the vase-painter** 

1 Cf. P. VIII. 8. 4, II. 10. 3, III. 23. 7. 

- Prof. Eidgeway, The Earlij Age of Greece, vol. i. p. 640. 

3 Usener, Die Sinflutsagen, p. 58, draws attention to the hypocoristic form 
'UpvKoKos, see Hesych. s.v. rbv "QpaKKia ^ui<ppwv vttokopkttikQs, and supposes an old 
Greek diminutive >faXos = Lat. cuius, homunculus, Herculus. This nowise conflicts 
with his original connection with Hera, conclusively proved by Mr A. B. Cook, 
Class. Rev. 1906, p. 365. Bather it confirms it, for Hera as well as Herakles are 
in significance and in etymology akin to rjpios. See Dr Sam Wide, ' Chthonische 
und himmlische Gotter ' in Arcliiv f. Religioiisioissenscliaft, 1907, p. 262. 

* See p. 12. 

3 Diod. Sic. IV. 40 Tr)v '"Rpav aua^daav ewl x\iv7)v Kal rbu "RpaK\4a -rrpoaXa^ofih-qv 
Trpbs rb ffQfia 5ia rCiv ev5v/J,dTiov dcfxivai wpbs tt}v yrjv fjLifjLovfjL^vrjv ttjv a.\7]divrjv yiveaiv 
oirep fJ-ixP'- to'J ^^^ iroulv tov% ^apjBdpovs 8rav derov vlbv Troielffdai (SovXtovTai. 

•> Eosch. Lex. s.v. Herakles, ' Apotheose,' p. 2239, 



VIl] 



HeraJdes 



347 



diligently paints his reception into Olympus, he is always 
elaborately entering, yet he is never really in, he is too much 
a man to wear at ease the livery of an Olympian, and literature, 
always over-Oiymj)ianized, makes him too often the laughing- 
stock of the stage. 








Fio. 101. 



More often it is the fate of a hero to become locally a divinity 
of healing, but never to emerge as a Panhellcnic god. In the 



348 



The Making of a God 



[CH. 



design in fig. 101 we have a good instance — from a vase^ found in 
Boeotia and now in the National Museum at Athens. On the 
obverse a bearded man, wearing a wreath, reclines at a banquet. 
A table with cakes stands by his couch. An enormous coiled snake 
is about to drink from the wine-cup in his hand. On the reverse 
a woman-goddess holding a sceptre is seated, a girl brings offerings 
— an oinochoe, cakes, a lighted taper. Above are hung votive 
offerings — a hand, two legs, such as hang in the shrines of saints 
in Brittany and Italy to-day. An interpreter unversed in the 
complexity of hero-cults would at once name the god with the 
snake on the obverse Asklepios, the goddess with the votive limbs 
on the reverse Hygieia ; but to these names they have no sort of 
right. Found as the vase was in Boeotia, the vase-painter more 
probably intended Amphiaraos, or possibly Trophonios, and Agathe 
Tj'che. All we can say is that they are a couple of healing 
divinities — hero and heroine divinized. 

The vase is of late style, and the artist has forgotten that the 
snake is the hero ; he makes him a sort of tame attributive pet, 
feeding out of the 
wine-cup. The snake 
is not bearded, but he 
has a touch of human 
unreality in that he is 
about to drink out of 
the wine-cup. These 
humanized snakes are 
fed with human food ; 
their natural food 
would be a live bird 
or a rabbit. Dr Gadow 
kindly tells me that 
a snake will lap milk, 
but if he is to eat 
his sacrificial food, the 
pelanos, it must be 
made exceedingly thin: 

anything of the nature of a cake or even porridge he could not 
swallow. And yet the snake on the Acropolis had for his monthly 

1 'E(pr])j.epls 'Apx. 1890, PL vii. 




Fig. 102. 



vii] The 'Hero-Feasts' 349 

due a ' honey cake,' and at Lebadeia^ in the shrine of Trophonios, 
where it "was a snake who gave oracles, the inhabitants of the 
country ' cast into his shrine flat cakes steeped in honey.' 

Representations of the hero reclining at a feast occur very 
frequently on votive reliefs of a class shortly to be discussed. They 
appear very rarely on vases and only on those of late style. A good 
instance is the design in fig. 102 from a late red-figured krater 
in the Berlin Museum 2. The attempt to give a name to the 
recumbent man is quite fruitless: the great snake marks him as 
a dead hero. The woman and boy can scarcely be said to be 
worshippers, though the boy brings cakes and fruit ; it is rather 
the feast that went on in life figured as continuing after death. 

It remains to examine some of the class of votive reliefs closely 
analogous to the vase-painting in fig. 102, reliefs usually known 
as ' Hero-Feasts ' or ' Funeral Banquets.' They are monuments 
especially instructive for our purpose, because nowhere else is 
seen so clearly the transition from hero to god, and also the 
gradual superposition of the Olympians over local hero-cults. 

The 'Hero-Feasts.' 

Plato^ in the Laius arranges the objects of divine worship in a 
regular sequence : first the Olympian gods together with those who 
keep the city; second the underworld gods whose share are things of 
unlucky omen; third the daemons whose worship is characterized 
as 'orgiastic'; fourth the heroes; fifth ancestral gods. He concludes 
the list with living parents to whom much honour should be 
offered. As early as Hesiod'* theology attempted some differentia- 
tion between heroes and daemons ; daemons being accounted divine 
in some higher sense. Of all this minute departmentalism ritual 

1 Schol. ad Ar. Nuh. 508 iv Xe^adeig. Upbv ecxTi Tpo^uflov brrov 6<pis rjv 6 fiavrevb- 
nevos (^ oi KaToiKouures TrXaKoOurat e^aWov yuAtrt deoevo/x^vovs. The ' pelanos' olTered 
by the women in the fourth Mime of Herondas {v. 90) was a money commutation. 
See Dr Herzo^'s imioortant paper ' Aus dem Asklepieion von Kos' in the Arcliiv f. 
Iieli<ii()nKwimenschaft, 1907, p. 20o. 

2 Berl. Cat. 3155. Jahrh. d. Inst. Anzeiger, 1890, p. 89. 

■* Plat. Li'mi. 717a. The Olympian gods do not here concern ns, but it may be 
worth noting that the gods who keep the state tous ttjv ndXtv ^x""''''" Oeovs, who are 
classed with the Olympians as of the first rank, seem to correspond with the 
d(TTvv6/j.oi and dyopaToi of Aeschylus (Ay. 90) who take rank with the ovpdvLoi. Some 
gods wherever found were Olympian, e.g. Zeus and Apollo; others though not 
Panhellenically recognised took rank as such locally, e.g. Demeter. 

* Hes. Enj. 109. 



350 



The Making of a God 



[CH. 



knows nothing. The only recognised distinction is that burnt 
offerings are the meed of the Olympians, offerings devoted (iva- 
yia/jbol) of the chthonic gods. Between the chthonic gods and 
the whole class of dead men, heroes and daemons, the only 
distinction observed is, as already noted, that certain chthonic 
gods from sheer conservatism reject the service of wine, whereas 
it is apparently acceptable to dead men, to heroes and to daemons 
not fully divinized. 

In like fashion votive reliefs of the type known as Hero- 
Feasts draw no distinction between hero and daemon, nor indeed 
do they clearly distinguish between ordinary dead man and hero. 
As a rule the ' Hero-Feasts ' are depicted on reliefs set up in 
sanctuaries rather than graveyards, but they occur sometimes on 
actual tombstones^ set up in actual cemeteries. 

The 'Hero-Feast' is found broadcast over Attica, the Pelopon- 




FiG. 103. 



nese and the islands ; there is scarcely a local museum that does 
not contain specimens. The design in fig. 103 is from a relief in 

^ There are several instances in the National Museum at Athens and ' Hero- 
Feasts ' have been carved on sarcophagi which are still in the courtyard of the local 
museum at Paros. 



VII] 



The ' Hero- Feasts ' 



351 



the local museum at Samos\ Three heroes are lying at the 
banquet ; one holds a large rhyton. A snake coiled about a tree 
is about to drink from it. Snake and tree mark a sanctuary, 
otherwise the scene is very homelike and ?ion-hieratic. Of the 
inscription only two letters remain, and they tell nothing. The 
round shield and the horse's head and the dog tell us we have 
to do with actual heroes, but who they were it is impossible 
to say. 

The relief in fig. 104 is also from Samos". It is of the usual 




Ai^f OlKIPSHP°'^^^X■Al^ £ 



Fio. 104. 

type — the recumbent ni;in, the seated woman, the boy about to 
draw wine. The field is full of characteristic tokens; for the 
man, the horse's head, the cuirass, helm, shield and greaves ; for 
the woman, the work-basket of the shape so often occurring on 

> Inv. 55, sec Dr Wiegand, ' Antike Sculpturcu in Samos,' //. Mitt. l')00, p. 17G. 
"■ Inv. (50. 



352 The Making of a God [ch. 

Athenian grave-reliefs, and, it may be, the tame bird which stands 
on the casket pecking at a fruit. The snake is for both, for both 
are dead. The inscription at first surprises us ; it is as follows : 
' Lais daughter of Phoenix, heroine, hail.' There is no mention 
of the hero, but on examination of the stone it is seen that a 
previous inscription has been erased ^ Some one cared more for 
Lais than for her husband, hence the palimpsest. 

These two specimens from Samos have been selected out of 
countless others because in them it is quite certain that heroized 
. mortals are represented. The earliest specimens of the ' Hero- 
Feast ' discovered had no inscriptions, and though horse and snake 
were present an attempt was made to interpret them as sacred to 
Asklepios ; the snake was ' the symbol of healing,' the horse that 
mysterious creature the 'horse of Hades ^.' The most ardent 
devotee of symbolic interpretation can scarcely make mythology 
out of the greaves and the work-basket. 

Reliefs of the ' Hero-Feast ' type are all of late date. The 
earliest one is doubtfully assigned to the end of the 5th century ; 
the great majority are much later. The reason is not far to seek. 
In the fine period of Greek Art, the period to which we owe most 
of the grave-reliefs found at Athens, hero-worship is submerged. 
It is a time of rationalism, and the funeral monuments of that 
time tend to represent this life rather than the next. I have tried 
elsewhere to show that early Attic grave-reliefs are cast in the 
type of the Sparta hero-reliefs, but nowhere in Attic grave-reliefs 
of the 5th century do we find the dead heroized. But once the 
age of reason past, hero-worship re-emerged, and it would seem in 
greater force than before. 

In the fine period of art hero-reliefs do exist, but not as 
funeral monuments. One of the earliest and finest* we possess 
is represented in fig. 105. It is not at all of the same type as 
the ' Hero-Feast,' and is figured here partly for its beauty and 
interest, partly to mark the contrast. A hero occupies the central 
place, leading his horse, followed by his hound. That he is a 

^ See Dr Wiegand, op. cit. p. 180. 

- See Dr Verrall, 'Death and the Horse,' J.H.S., xviii. 1898, p. 1. 

3 Koscher, s.v. Heros, p. 2559, No. 5. A better reproduction in phototype has 
been published by Dr Chr. Blinkenberg, ' Et Attisk Votivrelief,' Festskrift til 
J. L. Ussiiig, Kopenhagen, 1900. I follow Dr Ussing's view (kindly translated for 
me by Dr Martin Nilsson). 



\T[] 



Hippolytos 



353 



hero we are sure, for in front of him is his low, omphalos-like 
altar, and to the left a worshipper approaches. Unhappily there 




Fig. 105. 



is no inscription, but yet we are tempted to give the hero a 
name. 

Horse and horseman are set against a rocky background. The 
marble of which the relief is made is Pentelic, the style Attic, with 
many reminiscences of the Parthenon marbles. It is therefore not 
too bold to see in the rocky background a slope of the Acropolis. 
To the right above the hero is a seated figure, with only the lower 
part of the body draped. Zeus is so represented and Asklepios. 
Zeus has no shrine on the slopes of the Acropolis, nor is it 
probable he would be depicted on a relief of this date seated 
in casual fashion as a spectator. The figure is almost certainly 
Asklepios. Given that the figure is Asklepios, the narrative of 
Pausanias^ supplies the clue to the remaining figures. 'Approach- 
ing the Acropolis by this road, next after the sanctuary of 
Asklepios is the temple of Themis, and in front of this temple 
is a mound upreared as a monument to Hippolytos.' Then 
Pausanias tells the story of Pi)aedra and Hipi)olytos ; he does 
not actually mention the sanctuary of Aphrodite, but ho says 
' the old images were not there in my time, but those I saw were 
the work of no obscure artists.' Images of course presuppose 
a sanctuary, and such a sanctuary we now know from inscriptions 

' P. 1. 22. 1 — .3, see Dr Frazer ad loc, and Muth. and Moii. Anc. Athens, p. 328. 



H. 



23 



354 The Making of a God [ch. 

and votive offerings found on the spot to have existed, and that it 
was dedicated to Aphrodite Pandemos. The figures on the relief 
exactly correspond to the account of Pausanias. To the right, 
i.e. to the East, the figure of Asklepios; next Themis with her 
temple, clearly indicated by the two columns between which she 
stands ; immediately in front of her Hippolytos with his sacred 
altar-mound. Above it Aphrodite, literally ' over Hippolytos ' 
('iTTTroXvTa) S' eiTi). It is as Euripides^ knew it: 

'And Phaedra then, his father's Queen liigh born, 
Saw him, and as she saw her heart was torn 
With great love by the working of my will. 
And there, when he was gone, on Pallas' hill 
Deep in the rock, that Love no more might roam. 
She built a shrine and named it Love-at-Home. 
And the rock held it, but its face always 
Seeks Trozen o'er the seas.' 

It is worth noting that the relief, now in the Torlonia Museum 
at Rome, was found not far from Aricia, where the hero Virbius, 
the Latin equivalent of Hippolytos, was worshipped. 

It is possible that in the tragedy of the wrath of Aphrodite 
against the hero who worshipped Artemis, and in the title of the 
goddess ' over Hippolytos,' later misunderstood as ' because of,' 
'for the sake of Hippolytos, we have a reminiscence of a super- 
position of cults — that the actual contest was between a local 
hero and Aphrodite who had waxed to the glory of an Olympian. 
Such a view can however scarcely be deduced from the relief in 
question, which seems to present relations merely toi^ographical 
and perfectly peaceful. 

The design in fig. 106, from a relief in the Jacobsen- collection 
at N}' Carlsberg, Copenhagen, shows a clearer case of supersession. 
The design is not earlier than the 4th century B.C. and of the 
usual type of ' Hero-Feast ' ; we have the reclining man, seated 
wife, attendant cupbearer, and, to make the scene quite complete, 

1 Eur. Hipp. 26 ff., trans. Mr Gilbert Murray. For Aphrodite Eudemos, 
Love-at-Home, see Dr Verrall, CI. Rev., Dec. 1901, p. 449. Dr Svoronos makes the 
interesting suggestion that the sanctuary founded by Phaedra may have been on 
the site later occupied by the temple of Nike Ajjteros, and that the Wingless Victory 
may have been a title rather of Aphrodite than of Athene. See Journal Inter- 
national cVArchf'ologie, 1901, p. 459. 

2 Cat. 95, published and fully discussed by Prof. Furtwiingler, ' Ein sogenanntes 
Todtenmahlrelief mit Inschrift,' Sitzungsberichte d. k. Bay. Ak. d. Wissenschaften, 
Philos.-Philolog. Kiasse 1897, p. 401. 



vn] 



Zeus Philios 



355 



three worshippers of smaller size. The procession of worshippers 
is a frequent, though not uniform, element in the reliefs repre- 
senting ' Hero-Feasts.' When present they serve to show very 
clearly that the hero and his wife are objects of worship. As a 








Fig. 106. 

rule it is, we have seen, safest not to name the hero. In the 
cases so far where he or the heroine is inscribed, the name has 
been that of a mortal. In the present case the inscription has a 
surprise in store for us. Assuredly no one, without the inscrij)- 
tions, would have ventured to conjecture the inscribed names. 
The inscription runs as follows : 

' Aristomache, Theoris and Olyinpiodonis dedicated (it) to Zeus Epiteleios 
Philios, and to Philia tlie motlicr of the god, and to Tycho Agathc the wife of 
the god.' 

Philia, the Friendly One, is mother not wife of Zeus Philios, 
'Zeus the Friendly'; it is the old matriarchal relation of Mothci- 
and Son (p. 273). But the dedicators, related themselves no doubt 
after patriarchal fashion, seem to feel a need that Zeus Philios 
should be married ; they give him not his natural shadow-wife 
Philia — she has been used up as mother — but Tyche Agathe, 

23—2 



356 The Making of a God [ch. 

' Good Fortune.' In the procession of worshippers there are two 
women with a man between them : probably they are his mother 
and wife and wish to see their relation to him mirrored in their 
dedication. But they are content with the traditional type of 
Hero-Feasts, possibly the only type that the conservative workman 
kept in stock in his workshop. 

It is worth noting that this interesting relief came from a 
precinct of Asklepios in Munychia down at the Peiraeus, the 
same precinct which yielded the snake reliefs (figs. 1 and 2) dedi- 
cated to Meilichios. There were also found the relief in fig. 4, 
several reliefs adorned with snakes only, some reliefs representing 
Asklepios, and various ritual inscriptions. The precinct seems to 
have become a sort of melting-pot of gods and heroes. Tyche 
we know at Lebadeia as the wife of the Agathos Daimon, the 
Good or Rich Spirit, and it is curious to note that Zeus on 
the relief holds a cornucopia, symbol of plenty. His other title 
Epiteleios points the same way. Hesychius^ tells us that the word 
eVtTeXetwcrt? means the same as av^-qa-L^, ' increase,' and Plato^ 
gives the name eTmeXeiuxrei';, ' accomplishments,' to family feasts 
held in thanksgiving for the birth and welfare of children. 

It seems obvious that the precinct once belonged to a hero, 
worshipped under the form of a snake, and as Meilichios, god 
of the wealth of the underworld — a sort of Agathos Daimon or 
Good Spirit. He must have had two other titles — Epiteleios, 
the Accomplished, and Philios, the Friendly One. At some time 
or other Asklepios took over the shrine of Meilichios, Philios, 
Epiteleios, as he took over the shrine of Amynos, but Zeus also 
put in a claim and the two divided the honours of the place. The 
old snake-hero was forgotten, overshadowed by the Olympian and 
the great immigrant healer; but the Olympian does not wholly 
triumph. He cannot change the local ritual, and he must consent 
to a certain interchange of attributes. 

This is quaintly shown in the two reliefs placed side by side 
in fig. 107*. The larger one to the left shows a seated god holding 
a cornucopia ; beneath his chair is an eagle. In deference to this 

1 Hesych. s.v. - Plat. Legg. yi. 784 d. 

3 Both reliefs are reproduced from photographs kindly given me by the German 
Archaeological Institute. The relief to Zeus Philios was found near the Hill of the 
Nymphs at Athens (C.I. A. ii. 1330), that to the Agathos Daimon significantly 
at Thespiae [C.I.A. i. 1815). 



Yll] 



Ze^fs Philios 



357 



characteristically Olympian bird we should expect the dedication 
to be to Zeus. We find it is to the 'Good Spirits' In the smaller 




A rEi.rpo-r 

Cr I rAOk PAX 
,t4 'AAE 1/ 

r\ rt AON 1 K 

ATAQOlAH/AOt: 







Fig. 107. 

relief a similar bird is perched below the chair, and a humble pig 
is the sacrifice, as it is to Zeus Meilichios ; the inscription tells us 
that ' the Club-men dedicated it to Zeus Philios in the archonship 
of Hegesios.' The relief is dated by this archonship as set up in 
the year 324/3 B.C. The Friendly Zeus was the god of good fellow- 
ship and was of wide popularity'-. To cheerful, hilarious souls it 

' For identification of Zeus and 'A7a^6s dal/xuiv see Paus. 8. 36. 5 and Dr Martin 
Nilsson, GTiechiaclu; Festc, p. 401. 

^ vr) rbv <i>l\iov was a popular oath, cf. Ar. Acharii. 7H0. The omission of the 
proper name is significant. 



358 The Making of a God [ch. 

was comforting to think that there was another Zeus, less remote, 
more of the cornucopia and less of the thunderbolt, and that he 
was ready to join a human feast. The diner-out needs and finds 
a god in his own image, and Zeus — Zeus with his title of Philios, 
accustomed as he was to Homeric banquets, was ready for the post. 
So the comic parasite reasons^ : 

' I wish to explain clearly 
What a holy orthodox business this dining-out is — 
An invention of the gods ; the other arts 
Were invented by men of talent, not by the gods. 
But dining-out was invented by Zeus the Friendly, 
By common consent the greatest of all the gods. 
Now good old Zeus comes straight into people's houses 
In his free and easy way, rich and poor alike. 
Wherever he sees a comfortable couch set out 
And by its side a table properly laid, 
Down he sits to a regular dinner with courses. 
Wine and dessert and all, and then off he goes 
Straight back home, and he never pays his shot.' 

The fooling is obviously based on ritual practice in the 
' Hero-Feast ' that developed into the Feasts of the Gods, the 
Theoxenia. 

Our argument ends where it began — with Zeus Meilichios, an 
early chthonic stratum of worship, a later Olympian supersession. 
The two religions, alien in ritual, alien in significance, never more 
than mechanically fused". We have also seen that the new religion 
was powerless to alter the old save in name ; the Diasia becomes 
the festival of Zeus, the ritual is a holocaust offered to a snake ; 
Apollo and Artemis take over the Thargelia, but it remains a 
savage ceremony of magical purification. 

It might seem that we had reached the end. In reality, for 
religion in any deep and mystical sense, we have yet to watch the 
beginning ; we have yet to see the coming of a god, who came from 
the North and yet was no Achaean, no Olympian, who belonging 
to the ancient stock revived the ancient ritual, the sacrifice that 
was in its inner content a sacrifice of purification, but revived it 
with a significance all his own, the god who took over the ritual 
of the Anthesteria, Dionysos, 

1 Diod. Sinop. frg. ap. Athen. vi. p. 239. Meineke, F.C.G. in. 543. 
- For cases of fusion and transition see Dr Sam Wide's interesting paper 
' Chthonische iind bimmlische Gotter,' Archiv f. Religionswissenschaft, 1907, p. 257. 



^Tl] 



Dionysos on Hero-reliefs 



359 



Dionysos on Hero-reliefs. 

The passing from the old to the new is very curiously and 
instructively shown in the two designs in figs. 108 and 109. The 
design in fig. 108 is from a relief found in the harbour of Peiraeus 
and now in the National Museum at Athens^ The material is 
Pentelic marble ; in places the surface has suffered considerably 
from the corrosion of sea- water. The fine style of the relief dates 
it as probably belonging to the end of the 5th century B.C. 

The general type of the relief is of course the same as that 
of the ' Hero-Feast -.' A youth on a couch holds a rhyton, the 




Fig. 108. 

usual woman is seated at his feet, the usual procession stands 
to the left. But it is a ' Hero-Feast ' with a difference. The 
group of ' worshippers ' are not worshippers ; they are talking 
among themselves, they hold not victims or other offerings, but 
the implements of the drama — a mask, a tambourine. This is 

' Cut. 1500. Both designs in figs. 108 and lO'J are reproduced from ijlioto^niplis. 

- TLe most recent account of this mucli discussed relief is by Dr Htudiiiczka, 
' Ueljcr das ScLauspielerrelief aus dcui reiracus,' in M('l(iu<ics J'crrot, p. ;}07. The 
relict was first published A. MiUlwUimiicn 1882, Taf. 11, p. ;}81): see also Hermca 
1887, )). :m;. a. Mitt. 1888, p. 221. Kciscii, Welhije»chenkc, p. 2."{. .hiiulmch 
d. Iritt. la'Jf,, p. 101. A. Mitt. I8'.i(;, p. a02. 



360 The Making of a God [ch. 

clearly seen in the case of the middle figure, a woman^ The 
' worshippers ' are tragic actors. This prepares us for the fact 
disclosed by the inscriptions beneath the figures of the youth and 
the attendant woman. Under the youth is written quite clearly 
Dionysos : under the woman was an inscription of which only two 
certain letters remain, the two last, ta. These inscriptions, it 
should clearly be noted, are later than the relief itself, probably 
not earlier than 300 B.C. The name of the woman attendant 
cannot certainly be made out : the most probable conjecture is 
(Paid)ia, Play, a natural enough name for a nymph attendant on 
Dionysos. 

The name of the god is certain, and, though the inscription is 
an afterthought, it certainly voices the intention of the original 
artist. It is to the honour of Dionysos, not to that of a hero, that 
the actors with their masks assemble — to his honour rather than 
to his definite worship. But none the less there remains the 
significant fact that the god has taken over the art-type of the 
' Hero-Feast.' 

The second reliefs in fig. 109 tells in slightly different and 
more elaborate form the same tale. The design is from a relief 
in the Museum at Naples, and is an instance of a type long 
known as the ' Ikarios reliefs.' Its style dates it as about the 
2nd cent. B.C. It clearly presents a blend of the ' Hero-Feast ' to 
the left and the triumphal entry of Dionysos, drunken, elderly, 
attended by a train of worshippers to the right. The immigrant 
god is received by the local hero. What local hero receives him 
we cannot say. Legend tells of such receptions by Ikarios, by 
Pegasos, by Amphictyon, by Semachos. The hero must remain 
unnamed ; anyhow he plays to Dionysos the part played by 
Sophocles, he is Dexion, Receiver, Host. It is a Theoxenia, a 
feasting of the god. The 'Ikarios' reliefs are late, and, in the 

1 Dr Studniczka (op. cit. suprca) has made a very close examination of tlie 
objects held, and attempts, I do not think successfully, to deduce therefrom the 
dramatic characters impersonated. The object held by the last figure to the left 
as well as his face is obliterated. It is sutiicient for our purpose that it is clear 
from the middle figure they are actors. 

- From a photograph. There are similar reliefs not quite so well preserved in 
the Louvre and in the British Museum {Cat. 176). A complete list of those extant 
is given by Hauser, Die Neu-attisclwii Reliefs, Anhaug, p. 189. The earliest specimen, 
more nearly approaching the 'Hero-Relief,' and so marked by the presence of 
a snake, is published Arch. Zeit. 1882, Taf. xiv., and I have already discussed it, 
Myth, and Mon. Anc. Athens, p. xlv. fig. 7. 



VII] 



Dioni/sos on Hero-reliefs 



361 



euphemistic manner of the time, the representation is all peace 
and harmony. The hero, be he who he may, receives in awe and 
reverence and gladness the incoming divine guest. But Herodotus 
tells another tale — a tale of the forcible wresting of the honours 







Fig. 109. 

of the hero to the glory of the god. In telling the early history 
of Sekyon under the tyrant Cleisthenes he' makes this notable 
statement : * The inhabitants of Sekyon paid other honours to 
Adrastos and they celebrated his misfortunes by tragic choruses, 
for at that time they did not honour Dionysos, but honoured 
Adrastos. Now Cleisthenes transferred these choruses (from 
Adrastos) to Dionysos, but the rest of the sacrifice he gave to 
Melanippos.' It is a sudden glimpse into a very human state of 
affairs. To put down the cult of Adrastos, the hero of a family 
alien to his own, Cleisthenes introduced the worship of a Theban 
hero Melanippos. He dared not for some reason give the tragic 
choruses to Melanippos; rather than the local enemy should 
still have them he hands them over to a popular immigrant god, 
Dionysos. 

The recumbent hero in the 'Hero-Feasts' is usually rcprc- 



^ Herod, v. 07. I owe this important reference to the article Heron in Itoscher's 
Lrxiron, p. 2492, but Dr Deneken calls no attention to its significance in relation 
to Dionysos. 



362 



The MciMng of a God 



[CH. VII 



sented as reclining at a feast and as drinking from a large wine- 
cnp, attended by a cupbearer. It 
may be conjectured that this type, 
which does not appear till late in 
the 5th century, came in with the 
worship of Dionysos. The idea 
of future bliss as an ' eternal 
drunkenness came, it will later be 
seen (Chap. Xl.), with the religion of 
Dionysos from the North. By an- 
ticipation we may note a curious 
fact. On the late Roman coins of the 
Bizuae\ a Thracian tribe, the type 
of the Hero-Feast occurs. An in- 
stance is given in fig. 110. A hero is represented — of that we are 
sure from the cuirass suspended on the tree, from the horse 
and from the snake — but a hero, I would conjecture, conceived 
of as transfigured into the feasting god, Dionysos himself. 

To the examination in detail of the cult of Dionysos we must 
now turn. 




Fig. 110. 



1 J.H.S. V. p. 116. Prof. Percy Gardner explains the coin as belonging to 
Asklepios: my suggestion is made with the utmost diffidence as differing from 
so great an authority on numismatics. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

DIONYSOS. 

' to MAKAp OCTIC (?YAAI- 

McoN xeAeiAc GecoN 
eiAcioc BioTAN Aricxeyei.' 

So far the formula for Greek theology has been, 'Man makes 
the gods in his own image.' Mythological development has 
proceeded on lines perfectly normal, natural, intelligible. In so 
far as we understand humanity we can predicate divinity. The 
gods are found to be merely magnified men, on the whole perhaps 
better but with frequent lapses into worse, quot homines tot sen- 
tentiae, quot sententiae tot del. 

As man grew more civilized, his image, mirrored in the gods, 
grew more beautiful and pari passu the worship he offered to 
these gods advanced from ' aversion ' {dirorpoTrrj) to ' tendance ' 
idepaireia). But all along we have been conscious that some- 
thing was lacking, that even these exquisite presentations of the 
Nymphs and the Graces, the Mother and the Daughter, are really 
rather human than divine, that their ritual, whether of ignorant 
and cruel ' aversion ' or of genial ' tendance,' was scarcely in our 
sense religious. These perfect Olympians and even these gracious 
Earth-goddesses are not really Lords over man's life who made 
them, they are not even ghosts to beckon and threaten, they are 
lovely dreams, they are playthings of his happy childhood, and 
when full-grown he comes to face realities, from kindly sentiment 
he lets them lie unburied in the lumber-room of his life. 

Just when Apollo, Artemis, Athene, nay even Zeus himself, 
were losing touch with life and reality, fading and dying of their 
own luminous perfection, there came into Greece a new religious 



364 Dionysos [CH. 

impulse, an impulse really religious, the mysticism that is em- 
bodied for us in the two names Dionysos and Orpheus. The 
object of the chapters that follow is to try and seize, with as 
much precision as may be, the gist of this mysticism. 

Dionysos is a difficult god to understand. In the end it is 
only the mystic who penetrates the secrets of mysticism. It is 
therefore to poets and philosophers that we must finally look for 
help, and even with this help each man is in the matter of 
mysticism peculiarly the measure of his own understanding. But 
this ultimate inevitable vagueness makes it the more imperative 
that the few certain truths that can be made out about the 
religion of Dionysos should be firmly established and plainly set 
forth. 

Dionysos an immigrant Thracian. 

First it is certain beyond question that Dionysos was a late- 
comer into Greek religion, an immigrant god, and that he came 
from that home of spiritual impulse, the North. These three 
propositions are so intimately connected that they may con- 
veniently be dealt with together. 

In the face of a steady and almost uniform ancient tradition 
that Dionysos came from without, it might scarcely be necessary to 
emphasize this point but for a recent modern heresy. Anthro- 
pologists have lately recognized^ and rightly, that Dionysos is in 
one of his aspects a nature-god, a god who comes and goes with 
the seasons, who has like Demeter and Kore, like Adonis and 
Osiris, his Epiphanies and his Recessions. They have rashly 
concluded that these undoubted appearances and disappearances 
adequately account for the tradition of his immigration, that he 
is merely a new-comer year by year, not a foreigner; that he is 
welcomed every spring, every harvest, every vintage, exorcised, 
expelled and slain in the death of each succeeding winter. This 
error is beginning to filter into handbooks. 

A moment's consideration shows that the actual legend points 
to the reverse conclusion. The god is first met with hostility, 
exorcised and expelled, then by the compulsion of his might and 

1 Mr A. G. Bather in an interesting article on 'The Problem of the Bacchae" 
(J.H.S. XIV. 1894, 2^. 263) concludes that the mvths of the introduction of Dionysos 
* do not find their origin in any introduction of the god from without, but in" the 
yearly iubringing of the new statue.' 



viii] Dionijsos, a late-coming Immigrant 



365 



magic at last welcomed. Demeter and Kore are season-goddesses, 
yet we have no legend of their forcible entry. Comparative an- 
thropology has done much for the understanding of Dionysos, but 
to tamper with the historical fact of his immigration is to darken 
counsel. 

Ancient tradition must be examined, and first as to the 
lateness of his coming. 

In Homer, Dionysos is not yet an Olympian. On the 
Parthenon frieze he takes his place among the seated gods. 
Somewhere between the dates of Homer and Pheidias his entry 
was effected. The same is true of the indigenous Demeter, so that 
this argument alone is inadequate, but the fact must be noted. 

The earliest monument of art showing Dionysos as an actual 
denizen of Olympus is the curious design from an amphora^ now 
in the Berlin Museum. The scene depicted is the birth of Athene 



ti|fffllS|P 




Fig. 111. 

and all the divinities present are carefully and sometimes curiously 
inscribed. Zeus with his thunderbolt is seated on a splendid 
throne in the centre. Athene springs from his head. To the 
right are Demeter, Artemis, Aphrodite, and last of all Apollo. 
To the left Eileithyia, Hermes, Hephaestos, and last Dionysos 
holding his great wine cup. 

From the style of the inscriptions the design can scarcely date 
later than the early part <jf the sixth century. The position and 
grouping of the different gods is noteworthy. Of course someone 
must stand on the outside, but Dionysos is markedly aloof from 
the main action. Hermes seems to come as messenger to the 

' Berlin, Cat. 1704. Mon. d. Inst. 187:J,v(.l. ix. PI. i;v. W. Helbig, Aiimili 1873, 
p. 100. The curious inscriptions do not licre concern us. 



366 



Dionysos 



[CH. 



furthest verge of Olympus to tell him the news. At the right, 
the other Northerner, Apollo, occupies the last place. 

Moreover on vase-paintings substantially earlier than the 
Parthenon marbles the scene of his entry into Olympus is not 
infrequent. As we have no literary tradition of this entry, the 
evidence of vase-paintings is here of some importance. The 
design selected (fig. 112) is from a cylix signed by the potter 
Euxitheos^ and can be securely dated as a work executed about 
the turn of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. On the obverse is an 




Fig. 112. 

assembly of the Olympians all inscribed; Zeus himself with his 
thunderbolt and Ganymede about to fill his wine cup, Athene 
holding helmet and lance, Hermes with a flower, Hebe, Hestia with 
flower and a branch, Aphrodite with dove and flower, Ares 
with helmet and lance. We might not have named them right 
but for their inscriptions. Hera and Poseidon are absent, Demeter 

^ Wiener Vorlegehldtter, Serie D, Taf. 1 and 2. The vase is now iu the Municipal 
Museum at Corneto. 



viii] Dlonysos received into Olympus 367 

not yet come. At this time the vase-painter is still free to make 
a certain choice, the twelve Olympians are not yet canonical. On 
the obverse the gods are seated waiting, and on the reverse the 
new god is coming in all his splendour in his chariot with vine 
and wine-cup in his hand. With him, characteristically, for he 
is never unaccompanied, come the Satyr Terpes playing on the 
lyre and the Maenad Thero with thyrsos and fawn and snake, and 
behind the chariot another Maenad Kalis with thyrsos and lion 
and a Satyr Terpon playing on the flute. At the close of the 
sixth century when Pratinas and Choirilos and Phrynichus were 
writing tragedies in his honour, the gates of that exclusive epic 
Olympus could no longer be closed against the people's god, and 
the potter knew it. But there had been a time of doubt and 
debate. We do not have these entries of Athene or Poseidon or 
even Hermes. 

Homer is of course our first literary source and his main notice 
of Dionysos is so characteristic it must be quoted in full. The 
fact that the passage stands alone — elsewhere through all Homer 
Dionysos is of no real account — has led critics to suspect that 
it is of later and local origin \ Be that as it may, the story 
glistens like an alien jewel in a bedrock of monotonous fighting. 
Diomede meets Glaucus in battle, but so great is the hardihood 
of Glaucus that Diomede fears he is one of the immortals and 
makes pious, prudent pause : 

' I, Diomedes, will not stand 'gainst heavenly Gods in war. 
Not Icjng in life was he of old who raised 'gainst gods his hand 
Strong Lycoorgos, Dryas' son. Tlirough Nysa's goodly land 
He Dionysos' Nursing Nymphs did chase, till down in fear 
They cast their wands upon the ground, so sore he smote them there, 
That fell king with the ox-smiter. But Dionysos fled, 
And plunged him 'neath the salt sea wave. Him sore discomfited 
Fair Thetis to her bosom took. Great fear the god did seize. 
With Lycoorgos they were wroth, those gods that dwell at ease, 
And Kronos' son did make him i)lind, and he was not for long. 
The inunortal gods they hated him l)ecause he did them wrong.' 

Homer is somewhat mysterious as to the end of Lycurgus — 
'Not long in life was he.' Sophocles- is more exjilicit, both as to his 

' II. VI. 129. Mr rrilljert Murray kindly draws my attention to tlie Kclioliast wlio 
fitates ad v. i:U that tlic Lycurgus Htory was told l)y EunioloH (of Coriutli) in tlic 
Kurojjia : rqs icropias iroWol invqaOrfaav irporiyov/ji.ii'us 5f 6 ttjv Evpu)Tr(tai> wtwoiriKiiis 

'■^ Soph. Ant. 'Joy. 



368 Dionysos [ch. 

nationality and his doom. He is a Thracian king, son of Dryas, 
and he was ' rock-entombed.' When Antigone is going to her 
death the chorus sing how in like fashion others had been forced 
to bend beneath the yoke of the gods, Danae, Lycurgus, the sons 
of Phineus, Oreithyia — three of them Thracians ; and of Lycurgus 
they tell : 

' He was bound by Dionysos, rock-entombed, 
Dryas' son, Edonian king; swiftly bloomed 
His dire wrath and drooped. So was he wrought 
To know his blindness and what god he sought 
With gibes mad-tongued. Yea and he set his hand 
To stay the god-inspired band, 
To quell his women and his joyous fire 
And rouse the fluting Muses into ire.' 

The loss of the Lycurgus trilogy of Aeschylus is hard to bear. 
One scene at least must have been something like a forecast of the 
Bacchae of Euripides. The dialogue between Lycurgus and the 
stranger-god captured and brought into his presence, is parodied 
by Aristophanes in the ThesDiophoriazusae and the scholiast^ 
tells us that the words : 

'Whence doth the womanish creature come?' 

occurred in the Edonians. 

Neither Homer nor Sophocles knew anything of the murder of 
the children. Who first piled up this fresh horror we do not know. 
Vase-paintings of the rather late red-figured style (middle of the 
fifth century B.C.) are our first sources. The punishment of sin 
was to the primitive mind always incomplete unless the offender 
was cut off with his whole family root and branch, and the murder 
of the children may have been an echo of the story of the mad 
Heracles. It is finely conceived on a red-figured krater-. On 
the obverse is the mad Lycurgus with his children dead and 
dying. He swings a double axe {^ovirky'j^). The ' ox-feller ' of 
Homer is probably a double axe, not a goad. It is the typical 
weapon of the Thracian, and with it the Thracian women regularly 
on vases slay Orpheus (p. 462). Through the air down upon 
Lycurgus swoops a winged demon of madness, probably Lyssa 
herself, and smites at the king with her pointed goad. To the 
left, behind a hill, a Maenad smites her timbrel in token of the 

1 Ar. Thesm. 135, schol. ad loc. 

2 Naples. Heydemann, Cat. 3237. Myth, and Mon. Anc. Athens, pp. 260, 261, 
figs. 11 and 12. 



vni] Dio7iysos and the Bessi 369 

presence of the god. On the reverse of the vase we have the 
peace of Dionysos who made all this madness. The god has sent 
his angel against Lycurgus, but no turmoil troubles him or his. 
About him his thiasos of Maeuads and Satyrs seem to watch the 
scene, alert and interested but in perfect quiet. 

The exact details of the fate of Lycurgus, varying as they do 
from author to author, are not of real importance. The essential 
thing, the factor which recurs in story after stor}^, is the rage 
against the dominance of a new god, the blind mad fury, the 
swift helpless collapse at the touch of a real force. All this 
is no symbol of the coming of the spring or the gathering of the 
vintage. It is the mirrored image of a human experience, of 
the passionate vain beating of man against what is not man and 
is more and less than man. 

The nature and essence of the new influence will be in part 
determined later. For the present the question that presses 
for solution is 'whence did it come?' 'where was the primitive 
seat of the worship of Dionysos ? ' 

The testimony of historians, from Herodotus to Dion Cassius, 
is uniform, and confirms the witness of Homer and Sophocles. 
Herodotus^ tells how Xerxes, when he marched through Thrace, 
compelled the sea tribes to furnish him with ships and those 
that dwelt inland to follow by land. Only one tribe, the Satrae, 
would suffer no compulsion, and then come the significant words : 
' The Satrae were subject to no man so far as we know, but down 
to our own day they alone of all the Thracians are free, for 
they dwell on high mountains covered with woods of all kinds 
and snow-clad, and they are keenly warlike. These are the people 
that possess an oracle shrine of Dionysos and this oracle is on the 
topmost range of their mountains. And those among the Satrae 
who interpret the oracle are called Bessi ; it is a priestess who 
utters the oracles as it is at Delphi, and the oracles are nothing 
more extraordinary than that.' Herodotus is not concerned with 
the religion of Dionysos ; he does not even say that the religion 
of Dionysos spread southward into Greece, but lie states the 
all-important fact that the Satrae were never conquered. They 
received no religion from without. Here among those spltiidid 

1 Herod, vii. 110. 
H. 24 



370 Dionysos [ch. 

unconquerable savages in their mountain fastnesses was the real 
home of the god. 

Herodotus speaks of the Bessi as though they were a kind of 
priestly caste among the Satrae, but Strabo^ knows of them as 
the wildest and fiercest of the many brigand tribes that dwelt on 
and around Mt. Haemus. All the tribes about Mt. Haemus were, 
he says, 'much addicted to brigandage, but the Bessi who possessed 
the greater part of Mt. Haemus were called brigands by brigands. 
They are the sort of people who live in huts in very miserable 
fashion, and they extend as far as Rhodope and the Paeoniaus.' 
He mentions the Bessi again- as a tribe living high up on the 
Hebrus at the furthest point where the river is navigable, and 
again emphasizes their tendency to brigandage. 

The evil reputation of the Bessi lasted on till Christian days, 
till they bowed beneath the yoke of one gentler than Dionysos. 
Towards the end of the fourth century A.D. the good Bishop of 
Dacia, Niketas, carried the gospel to these mountain wolves and, 
if we may trust the congratulatory ode written to him by his 
friend Paulinus, he carried it not in vain. Paulinus celebrates 
the conversion of the Bessi as follows : 

' Hard were their lands and hard those Bessi bold, 
Cold were their snows, their hearts than snow more cold, 
Sheep in the fold from roaming now they cease, 
Thy fold of peace. 

Untamed of war, ever did they refuse 
To bow their heads to servitude's hard use, 
'Neath the true yoke their necks obedient 
Are gladly bent. 

They who were wont with sweat and manual toil 
To delve their sordid ore from out the soil 
Now for their wealth with inward joy untold 
Garner heaven's gold. 

There where of old they prowled like savage beasts, 
Now is the joyous rite of angel feasts. 
The brigands' cave is now a hiding place 
For men of grace^.' 

1 Strabo vii. § 318. - Strabo frg. vii. 

3 Paulinus Nol. carm. xxx. de reditu Niket. Episc. in Daciam. 

Nam simul terris animisque duri 

et sua Bessi nive duriores 

nunc eves facti duce te gregantur 
pacis in aulam. 

quasque cervices dare servituti 

semper a bello iudomiti negarant 

nuuc iugo veri domini subactas 
sternere gaudent. 



Till] Dioni/sos in the ' Bacclme' 371 

Thucydides^ in his account of Thracian affairs is silent about 
the Bessi and his silence surprises us. It is probably accounted 
for by the fact that in his days the Odrysae had complete supremacy, 
a supremacy that seems to have lasted down to the days of Roman 
domination. The autochthonous tribes were necessarily obscured. 
He mentions however certain mountain peoples who had retained 
their autonomy against Sitalkes king of the Odrysae and calls them 
by the collective name Dioi. Among them were probably the 
Bessi, for we learn from Pliny- that the Bessi were known by 
many names, among them that of Dio-Bessi. It seems possible 
that to these D/o-Bessi the god may have owed one of his many 
names. 

In the face of all this historical evidence, it is at first a little 
surprising to find that, in the Bacchae of Euripides, Dionysos is 
no Thracian. He is Theban born, and comes back to Thebes, 
after long triumphant wanderings not in Thrace but in Asia, 
through Lydia, Phrygia to uttermost Media and Arabia. On this 
point Euripides is explicit. In the prologue-' Dionysos says : 

' Far now behind me lies the golden land 
Of Lydian and of Phrygian — far away 
The wide, hot plains where Persian sun-beams play, 
The Bactriau war-holds and the storm-oppressed 
Clime of the Mede and Araby the l)lest, 
And Asia all, that by the salt sea lies 
In proud embattled cities, motley-wise 
Of Hellene and Barbarian interwrought, 
And now I come to Hellas, having taught 
All the woiid else my dances and my rite 
Of mysteries, to show me in man's sight 
Manifest God.' 

Dionysos is made to come from without, not as an immigrant 

nunc magis dives pretio laboris 
Bessus exultat, quod hunii manuque 
ante quaerebat, uiodo mente caeli 

colligit aurum. 
**«**♦ 

mos ul)i (juondaiii fueriit feraruni, 
nunc ibi litus viget aiigeloniin 
et latet Justus quibus ipse latro 
vixit in antiis. 
For this and many other valuable references about the Bessi, I am indebted to 
Dr Tomaschek's article 'Ueber Brumalia uiid Rosalia,' Sitzitti;/Hhcr. d. K. .ihntl. <l. 
Wi^sviiHchiiitcn, i'hil.-Hist. Kl., Wieu, IHliH, \,. a.'jl. 
' Thucyd. ii. 1)0. 
- riin. Is.JI. IV. l^i. 11. 40. ^ Eur. Baccb. 13. 

24—2 



372 Dionysos [ch. 

stranger but as an exile returned. Moreover, if historical tradition 
be true, he is made to come from the wrocg place. He comes 
also attended by a train of barbarian women, Asiatic not Thracian. 
They chant their oriental origin^: 

' From Asia, from the day-spring that uprises, 
From Tmolus ever glorying we come,' 

and again - : 

' Hither, O fragrant of Tmohis the golden.' 

Yet Euripides wrote the play in Macedonia and must have 
known perfectly well that these Macedonian rites that so im- 
pressed his imagination were from Thrace ; that, as Plutarch 
tells us-', ' The women called Klodones and Mimallones performed 
rites which were the same as those done by the Edonian women 
and the Thracian women about the Haemus.' He knows it 
perfectly well and when he is off his guard betrays his knowledge. 
In the epode of the third choric song"* he makes Dionysos come 
to bless Pieria and in his coming cross the two Macedonian rivers, 
the Axios and Lydias : 

' Blessed land of Pierie, 
Dionysos loveth thee, 

He will come to thee with dancing, 
Come with joy and mystery, 
With the Maenads at his best 
Winding, winding to the west ; 

Cross the flood of swiftly glancing 
Axios in majesty, 
Cross the Lydias, the giver 

Of good gifts and waving green, 
Cross that Father Stream of story 
Through a land of steeds and glory 
Rolling, bravest, fairest River 

E'er of mortals seen.' 

Euripides as poet can afford to contradict himself. He accepts 
popular tradition, too careless of it to attempt an irrelevant con- 
sistency. It matters nothing to him whence the god came\ The 
Theban birth-place, the home-coming were essential to the human 

1 Eur. Bacch. 65. - lb. 152. 

3 Plut. Vit. Alex. 2. 4 Eur. Bacch. 565. 

5 To Euripides iu the Bacchac Dionysos is the god of the grape. The vine 
probably came from Asia, though about this experts do not seem to be agreed, 
see Schrader, Real-lexicon; but Dionysos, as will later be shown, is earlier than 
the coming of the vine. 



vni] Diom/sos in the ' BaccJiae' 373 

pathos of his story. But for that we should have missed the 
appeal to Dirce ^ : 

' Achelous' roamins; daus:hter, 



and again - 



Holy Dirce, virgin water, 
Bathed he not of old in thee 
The Babe of God, the Mystery?' 



' Wliy, O Blessed among Rivers, 
Wilt thou fly me and deny me ? 
By his own joy I vow. 
By the grape upon the bough, 
Thou shalt seek him in the midnight, thou shalt love him even now.' 

He came unto his own and his own received him not. 

When we examine the evidence of art, we find that the simple 
vase-painter accepts the fact that Dionysos has become a Greek, 
and does not raise the question whence he came. In black and 
early red figured designs Dionysos is almost uniformly dressed as 
a Greek and attended by Greek Maenads. Later the artist becomes 
more learned and dresses Dionysos as a Thracian or occasionally 
as an Oriental. The vase-painting^ in fig. 113, from a late aryballos 



M 



I 



'■J 









^ 




*% 




i 

•'-'•'Si! 





1 -». ' 



.^' y .■ .^: 



-■^ 



Fig. 113. 

in the British Museum, has been usually interpreted as repre- 
senting the Oriental triumph of Dionysos. Rightly so, I incline 
to think, because the figure on the camel is attended not only 
by Orientals but by (Jreek maidens playing on cymbals. Their 
free upward bearing contrasts strongly with the sti'ange abject 
fantastic posturings of the Orientals. It must however be 
distinctly borne in jnind that the figure on the camel carries no 
Dionysiac attributes and cannot be certainly said to be the god. 

' Eur. liacch. .519. - Il>. 530. 

" Jlrit. Mm. Cat. k G'J5. Man. d. Imt. 1833 tav. h. 



374 Dionysos [cii. 

The question remains — why did popular tradition, accepted by 
Euripides and embodied occasionally in vase-paintings, point to 
Asia rather than to the real home, Thrace ? The answer in the 
main is given by Strabo^ in his important account of the pro- 
venance of the orgiastic worships of Greece. Strabo is noting 
that Pindar, like Euripides, regards the rites of Dionysos as 
substantially the same with those performed by the Phrygians in 
honour of the Great Mother. ' Very similar to these are,' he adds, 
' the rites called Kotytteia and Bendideia, celebrated among the 
Thracians. Nor is it at all unlikely that, as the Phrygians 
themselves are colonists from the Thracians, they brought their 
religious rites from thence.' In a fragment- of the lost seventh 
book he is still more explicit. He is mentioning the mountain 
Bernicos as formerly in possession of the Briges, and the Briges, 
he says, were ' a Thracian tribe of which some portion went across 
into Asia and were called by a modified name, Phrygians.' 

The solution is simple and is indeed almost a geographical 
necessity. If the Thracians dwelling in the ranges of Rhodope 
and Haemus went south at all, they would inevitably split up 
into two branches. The one would move westward into Macedonia, 
across the Axios and Lydias into Thessaly and thence downwards 
to Phocis, Boeotia and Delphi^; the other eastward across the 
Bosporus or the Hellespont into Asia Minor. Greek colonists 
in Asia Minor would recognize in the orgiastic cults they found 
there elements akin to their own worship of Dionysos. Wise 
men are not slow to follow the star that leads to the east, and it 
was pleasanter to admit a debt to Asia Minor than to own kinship 
with the barbarous north. Similarity of names, e.g. Lydias and 
Lydia, may have helped out the illusion and most of all the 
Theban legend of the Phoenician Kadmos^ 

But mythology is too unconscious not to betray itself. 
Herodotus'^ says that the Thracians worship three gods only: 
Ares, Dionysos and Artemis. Between Ares and Dionysos there 



* strabo x. 3 § 470. - Strabo frg. 25. 

^ The evidence for Thracian settlements at Dauhs, Trachis, Orchomenos, 
Thebes and Parnassos is fully given by Dr Weniger, ' Feralis Exercitus,' in 
Archiv f. Religionsivissenschaft, 1907, p. 76. 

* For the orientalism of the Theban character and legends, see Mr D. G. 
Hogarth, Philip and Alexander, p. 34. 

5 Herod, v. 7. 



VIIl] 



Diom/sos and Ares 



375 



would seem to be but little in common, but in one current myth 
their kinship comes out all unconsciously. It is just these un- 
conscious revelations that are in mythology of cardinal importance. 
The story is that known as 'the bonds of Hera' ("Hpa? 8eafx,ol). 
Hephaistos, to revenge himself for his downfall from heaven, sent 
to his mother Hera a golden throne with invisible bonds. The 
Olympians took counsel how they might free their queen. None 
but Hephaistos knew the secret of loosing. Ares^ vowed he would 
bring Hephaistos by force. Hephaistos drove him off with fire- 
brands. Force failed, but Hephaistos yielded to the seduction of 
Diouysos and was brought in drunken triumph back to Olympus. 
It was a good subject for broad comedy, and Epicharmus used it 
in his ' Revellers or Hephaistos.' It attained a rather singular 
popularity in art ; the subject occurs on upwards of thirty vase- 
paintings black and red figured. Earlier than any literary source 





Fio. 114. 

for the myth is unquestionably the famous Franyois- vase (early 
sixth century B.C.) in the Museo Civico at Florence, where the 
scene is depicted in Ijioad epic fashion and with some conscious 

' Sappho, frg. 66. 

^ Wiciiar Vorh'ni'hlottrr, Serie ii. Taf. iii., iv. An even earlier source is the 
Corinthian vase publiHhed by J)r Loschi<e, A. Milt. 1H<)4, p. ;j2'1, Taf. viii. 



376 Dionysos [ch. 

humour. All the figures are inscribed. Zeus is there and Hera, 
seated on the splendid, fatal throne. Dionysos leads the mule on 
which sits the drunken Hephaistos. Up they come into the very 
presence of Zeus with three attendant Silenoi carrying respec- 
tively a wine-skin, a flute, a woman. It is the regular revel rout. 
Behind the throne of Hera crouches Ares in deep dejection, on 
a sort of low stool of repentance, while Athene looks back at him 
with scorn. Why are Ares and Dionysos thus set in rivalry ? 
Not merely because wine is mightier than war, but because the 
two. Ares and Dionysos, are Thracian rivals, with Hephaistos of 
Lemnos for a third. It is a bit of local mythology transplanted 
later to Olympus. 

The diverse fates of these two Thracian gods are instructive. 
Ares was realized as a Thracian to the end. In Homer he is 
only half accepted in Olympus, he is known as a rufiian and a 
swashbuckler and like Aphrodite escapes^ to his home as soon as 
he is released : 

' Straightway forth sprang the twain ; 
To savage Thrace went Ares, but Kypris with sweet smile 
Hied her to her fair altar place, in pleasant Paphos' isle.' 

The newly admitted gods, such as Ares and Aphrodite, are 
never really at home in Olympus. Dionysos, as has already been 
seen (p. 365), has no place in the Homeric Olympus, but, once he 
does force an entry, his seat is far more stable. In the Oedijms 
Tyrannos Sophocles^ realizes that Dionysos and Ares are the 
great Theban divinities, but Ares is of slaughter and death, 
Dionysos of gladness and life. He makes his chorus summon 
Dionysos to banish Ares his fellow divinity : 

' O thou with golden mitre band, 
Named for our land, 
On thee in this our woe 
I call, thou ruddy Bacchus all aglow 

With wine and Bacchant song. 

Draw nigh, thou and thy Maenad throng, 
Drive from us with bright torch of blazing pine 
The god unhonoured 'mong the gods divine.' 

Sophocles just hits the theological mark. Ares is a god but he 
is unhonoured of the orthodox gods, the Olympians. 

1 Od. VIII. 265. 2 Soph. Oed. Tyr. 209. 



Yiii] Dionysos and Ares 877 

Euripides^ too lets out the kinship with Ares. He knows of 

' Harmonia, daughter of the Lord of War,' 

Harmonia, bride of Kadmos, mother of Semele, and though his 

Dionysos is at the outset all gentleness and magic, his kingdom 

scarcely of this world, Teiresias- knows that he is not only Teacher, 

Healer, Prophet, but 

'of Ares' reahu a part hath he. 
AMien mortal armies mailed and arrayed 
Have in strange fear, or ever blade met blade, 
Fled, maddened, 'tis this god hath palsied them,' 

and though the panic he sends is from within not without, yet 
the mention is significant. Dionysos, for all his sweetness, is to 
the end militant, he came not to bring peace upon the earth but 
a sword, only in late authors his weapons are not those of Ares. 
On vase-paintings he is not unfrequeutly depicted doing on his 
actual armour, but Polyaenus^, in the little treatise on mytho- 
logical warriors with which he prefaces his Strategika, notes the 
secret armour of the god, the lance hidden in ivy, the fawn-skin 
and soft raiment for breastplate, the cymbals and drum for 
trumpet. To the end the god of the brigand Bessi was Lord 
of War. 

Art tells the same tale, that the Thracian Dionysos succeeded 
where the equally Thracian Ares failed. Among the archaic seated 
gods on the frieze of the treasury of Cnidos recently discovered 
at Delphi^ Ares has found a place, but a significant one, at the 
very end, on a seat by himself, as though naively to mark the 
difference. Even on the east frieze of the Parthenon, where all 
is softened down to a decent theological harmony, there is just 
a lingering, semi-conscious touch of the same prejudice. Ares is 
admitted indeed, but he is not quite at home among these easy 
aristocratic Olympians. He is grouped with no one, he leans his 
arm on no one's shoulder ; even his pose is a little too consciously 
assured to be quite confident. 

It is abundantly clear that the remote Asiatic origin of 
Dionysos is emphasized to hide a more immediate Thracian 
provenance. The Greeks knew the god was not honie-grown, 

' Eur. Jiacch. 13.56. '^ Ih. ,302. ^ Polyaon. Strut . i. I. 

■• This nrnarkalilc frifzi; Ih in tin; locul iriuHeum at Delphi and Ih now reproduced 
in the oIKcial publication FouilleH dc Delplwx, I'ls. vii. — xv. 



378 Dionysos [ch. 

but he was so great, so good, so all-conquering, that they were 
forced to accept him. But they could not bear the truth, that 
he came from their rough north-country kinsmen the Thracians. 
They need not have been ashamed of these Northerners, who were 
as well born as and more bravely bred than themselves. Even 
Herodotus^ owns that ' the nation of the Thracians is the greatest 
among men, except at least the Indians.' 

Once fairly uprooted from his native Thracian soil, it was 
easy to plant Dionysos anywhere and everywhere wherever went 
his worshippers. His homeless splendour grows and grows till by 
the time of Diodorus his birthplace is completely apocryphal. In 
Homer, as lias been seen (p. 367), Nysa or as it is called Nyse'ion, 
Avhether it be mountain or plain, is clearly in Thrace, home of 
Lycurgus son of Dryas. But already in Sophocles-, in the beautiful 
fragment preserved by Strabo, wherever it may be, it is a place 
touched by magic, a silent land which 

' The horned lacchus loves for his dear nurse, 
Where no shrill voice doth sound of any bird.' 

Euripides^ never expressly states where he supposes Nysa to 
be, but the name comes to his lips coupled with the Korykian 
peaks on Parnassos and the leafy haunts of Olympus, so we may 
suppose he believed it to be northwards. As the horizon of the 
Greeks widened, Nysa is pushed further and further away to an 
ever more remote Noiuhere. Diodorus^ with much circumstance 
settles it in Libya on an almost inaccessible island surrounded by 
the river Triton. It mattered little so long as it was a far-off 
happy land. 

Convinced as he was of this remote African Nysa and of the 
great Asiatic campaign of Dionysos, it is curious to note that even 
Diodorus cannot rid his mind of Thrace. He knows of course the 
story of the Thracian Lycurgus and mentions incidentally that it 
was in a place called Nysion that Lycurgus set upon the Maenads 
and slew them, he knows too of the connection between Dionysos 
and Orpheus^ and never doubts but that Orpheus was a Thracian, 
a matter to be discussed later. Most significant of all, when he 

1 Herod, v. 3. 

■■^ Soph. frg. 782 ap. Strab. xv. 687. 3 Eur. Bacch. 556. 

* Diod. III. 4. 5 li. 65. 



vin] Satyrs and Centaurs 379 

is speaking^ of the trieteric ceremonies instituted in memory of 
the Indian expedition, he automatically records that these were 
celebrated not only by Boeotians and the other Greeks but hy the 
Thracians. Thrace is obscured by the glories of Phrygia, Lydia, 
Phoenicia, Arabia and Libya, but never wholly forgotten. 

The Satyrs. 

Dionysos then, whatever his nature, is an immigrant god, a 
late comer, and he enters Greece from the north, from Thrace. 
He comes not unattended. With him are always his revel rout 
of Satyrs and of Maenads. This again marks him out from the 
rest of the Olympians; Poseidon, Athene, Apollo, Zeus himself 
has no such accompaniment. As man makes the gods in his own 
image, it may be well before we examine the nature and functions 
of Dionysos to observe the characteristics of his attendant worship- 
pers, to determine who and what they are and whence they come. 

The Satyrs first — they are (what else should they, could they 
be?) the Satrae"; and these Satrae-Satyrs have many traits in 
common with the more mythological Centaurs, The evidence of 
the coins of Macedonia is instructive. On the coins of Orreskii'', 
a centaur, a horse-man, bears off a woman in his arms. At Lete 
close at hand, with a coinage closely resembling in style, fabric, 
weight the money of the Orreskii and other Pangaean tribes, the 





Fifi. 115. 

type is the same in content, though with an instructive difference 
of form — a naked Satyr or Seilenos with the hooves, ears and tail 

> Diod. IV. 3. 

2 This was first, I believe, observed by Dr Head (Hist. Num. p. 176). In 
discussing the coinage of Lete in Macedonia he ways : ' The coin types all refer to 
the orgiastic rites practised in tlic worship of tlio mountain Bacchus, which 
originated in the country of tlic Satrae or Satyrs' (Herod, vii. 111). 

^ Prof. Kidgf-way (Karlij Anc <if (in-ccc, vol. i. p. :Jl.'i) identifies the Orreskii of 
the coins with the Orestae of Strabo (§ 434). He thinks the slight difference in 
form is due to a copyist's mistake of r for k. 



380 Dionysos [oh. 

of a horse seizes a woman round the waist. These coins are of 
the sixth century B.C. Passing to Thasos, a colony of the Thracians 
and like it rich in the coinage that came of gold mines, we find 
the same type. On a series of coins that range from circ. 500 — 
411 B.C. we have again the Satyr or Seilenos bearing off the woman. 
An instance, for clearness' sake one of comparatively late date^ is 
given in fig. 115. 

This interchange of types, Satyr and Centaur, is evidence 
about which there can be no mistake. Satyr and Centaur, 
slightly diverse forms of the horse-man, are in essence one and 
the same. Nonnus" is right: 'the Centaurs are of the blood of 
the shaggy Satyrs.' It remains to ask — who are the Centaurs ? 

There are few mythological figures about which more pleasant 
baseless fancies have been woven ; woven irresponsibly, because 
mythologists are slow to face solid historical fact ; woven because, 
intoxicated by comparative philology, they refuse to seek for the 
origin of a myth in its historical birthplace. The Centaurs, it 
used to be said, are Vedic Gandharvas, cloud-demons. Mythology 
now-a-days has fallen from the clouds, and with it the Centaurs. 
They next became mountain torrents, the offspring of the cloud 
that settles on the mountain top. The Centaurs have possession 
of a wine-cask, the imprisoned forces of the earth's fertility 
are left in charge of the genius of the mountain. The cask is 
opened, this is the unlocking of the imprisoned forces at the 
approach of Herakles, the sun in spring, and this unlocking is 
the signal for the mad onset of the Centaurs, the wild rush of 
the torrents. Of the making of such mythology truly there is 
no end, 

Homer^ knew quite well who the opponents of Peirithoos were, 
not cloud-demons, not mountain torrents, but real wild men {(prjpe'i), 
as real as the foes they fought with. He tells of the heroes Dryas, 
father of Lycurgus, and Peirithoos and Kaineus : 

' Mightiest were they, and with the mightiest fought. 
With v;ild men mountain-haunting.^ 

1 Head, Hist. Num. p. 176. 
- Nonnus, Dionys. xiii. 43 

Kai Xaffiuv llaTvpwv Kevravpidoi alfia yevid\ri%. 
3 II. I. 262 

KaprtcFTOi fj-ev icav koI KapTiaTOLS ifiaxovTO 

(prjpfflu opeaKuiOLcri. 



vm] Satf/rs and Centaurs :381 

No one has, so far as we know, reduced the mighty Peirithoos, 
Drjas and Lycurgus to mountain torrents or sun myths. Why 
are their mighty foes to be less human ? 

Again in the .Catalogue of the Ships ^ we are told how 

Peirithoos 

' Took vengeance on the shaggy mountaiTi-men, 
Drave them from Pelion to the Aithikcs far.' 

In the name of common sense, did Peirithoos expel a storm- 
cloud or a mountain torrent and force it to leave Pelion and settle 
elsewhere ? The vengeance of Peirithoos is simply the expulsion 
of one wild tribe by another. 

In these passages from the Iliad the foes of Peirithoos are 
simply a tribe of wild men, Pheres. In the Odyssey, Homer- calls 
these same foes by the name Kentauri, and implies that they 
are ?ion-human. Speaking of the peril of ' honey-sweet wine ' 
he says : 

'Thence 'gan \.he feud 'twixt Centaurs and mankind.' 

For the right understanding of this later non-humanity of 
the Centaurs the development of their art type is of paramount 
importance. 

We are apt to think of the Centaurs exclusively somewhat as 
they appear on the metopes of the Parthenon, i.e. as splendid 
horses with the head and trunk of a man. By the middle of the 
fifth century B.C. in knightly horse-loving Athens the horse form 
had got the upper hand. In archaic representations the reverse 
is the case. The Centaurs are in art what they are in reality, 
men with men's legs and feet, but they are shaggy mountain men 
with some of the qualities and habits of beasts ; so to indicate this 
in a horse-loving country they have the hind-quarters of a horse 
awkwardly tacked on to their human bodies. 

A good example is the vase-painting in fig. 116 from an early 

black-figured lekythos in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Vases 

of this style cannot be dated later than the beginning of the 

sixth century B.C. and may be somewhat earlier''. The scene 

' //. n. 711 

OTi (pqpas iriffaro XaxfO^VTas 
rovs o' £K lirfXlov ijoae Kal kiOlKfadi TrAacrcrei'. 
^ Od. XXI. 'AQ'A i^ ov Kevravpoiai nal dvopda-i vetKos (tuxOt]. 

' Boston, Inv. No. 6508. American Journal of Arch<ic<)lo<i]i, I'JOO, pi. vi. p. 441. 
The vawe belongs to the class usually called ' proto-Corinthiun.' Mr J. C. Iloppin 
prefers to call it 'Aryive.' 



382 



Dionysos 



[CH. 



represented is the fight of Herakles with the Centaurs, To the 
left is a Centaur holding in his right hand a branch, the primitive 





Fig. 116. 

weapon of a primitive combatant. He is figured as a complete 
man with a horse-trunk appended. In the original drawing the 
horse-trunk is made more obviously an extra 
appendage from the fact that the human 
body is painted red and the horse-trunk 
black. Herakles too is a fighter with rude 
weapons ; he carries his club, which in this 
case is plainly what its Greek name indi- 
cates, a rough hewn trunk or branch or 
possibly root of a tree. The remainder of 
the design is not so clear and does not affect 
the present argument. The man with the 
sword to the right is probably lolaos. The 
object surmounted by the eagles I am quite 
unable to explain. 

The next stage in the development of the Centaur is seen 
in the archaic gem from the British 
Museum^ in fig. 118. Here the notice- 
able point is that the Centaur, though 
he has still the body of a man, is 
beginning to be more of a horse. He 
has hoofs for feet. He is behaving 
just like the Satyr on the coin in 
fig. 115, or the aggressor on the Fran9ois 
vase (fig. 114), he is carrying off a 

i J.H.S. vol. I. p. 130, fig. 1, i3ublished and discussed with other art representa- 
tions by Mr Sidney Colvin. 



Fig. 117. 




Am] Satyrs and Centaurs 383 

woman. It is the last step in the transition to the Centaur of 
the Parthenon, i.e. the horse with head and trunk of a man. 
Between Satyr and Centaur the sole difference is this : the 
Centaur, primarily a wild man, became more and more of a horse, 
the Satyr resisted the temptation and remained to the end what 
he was at the beginning, a wild man, with horse adjuncts of 
ears, tail and occasionally hoofs. Greek art, as has been already 
seen in discussing the Gorgon, was liberal in its experiments 
with monster forms, the horse Medusa failed (p. 179), the horse 
Centaur prevailed ^ 

The Parthenon type of the Centaur, the type in which the 
horse-form is predominant, obtains later in red-figured vase-paint- 
ings for all Centaurs save one, the virtuous Cheiron. Cheiron 
always keeps his human feet and legs and often wears a decent 
cloak to mark his gentle civilized citizenship. Pausanias" when 
examining the chest of Kypselos at Olympia, a monument dedi- 
cated in the seventh century B.C., noted this peculiarity: 'And the 
Centaur has not all his feet like a horse, but the front feet are 
the feet of a man.' Pindar^ does definitely in the case of Cheiron 
identify <^rjp and Kevravpo<^, but art kept for Cheiron the more 
primitive and human type to emphasize his humanity, for he is 
the trainer of heroes, the utterer of wise saws, the teacher of all 
gentle arts of music and medicine, he has the kind heart of a man. 

The charming little design in fig. 119 is from an oinochoe in 



»»aw«w«^^ 



Lli!iiil:iMJtliJLl iiiuU. Ui lUtULJI! I \\ il' 




Fk;. ir.». 



^ It is, it would seem, a mere chance that we have not wliat mipiht be called 
a 'fish Centaur.' On an early black- figureil vase {Tl. Mitt. ii. 1HH7, Taf. viii.) we 
havr; a series of men rc])resented as coiiipletuly liuman, not willi the body ending 
in fish tails, but with an extra llsb tail added to the coniph'to human body. 'I'liese 
are the natural monster-formH of a people dwelling on the Heacousl. 

^ P. V. 19. 9. * Pind. Vijth. in. T). 



384 Dionysos [ch. 

the British Museum ^ Though the technique is black-figured the 
delicate soft style is archaistic rather than archaic and the vase is 
probably not older than the middle of the fifth century B.C. The 
good Cheiron is a quaint blend of horse and middle-aged citizen. 
The tree branch he still carries looks back to the primitive habits 
he has left far behind, and the little tree in front marks the 
woodland home. But there is nothing shaggy about his neat 
decorous figure. Even the dog who used to go hunting with him 
is now alert to give a courteous welcome to the guest. A father 
is bringing his child, a little miniature copy of himself, to be 
reared in the school of Cheiron. Father and son are probably 
Peleus and Achilles, but the child might be Jason or even 
Asklepios. It is the good Centaur only who concerns us. How 
has he of the mountains, fierce and untameable, come to keep a 
preparatory school for young heroes ? The answer to this question 
is interesting and instructive. 

Prof. Ridgeway- has shown that in the mythology of the 
Centaurs we have a reflection of the attitude of mind of the 
conquerors to the conquered. This attitude is, all the world over, 
a double one. The conquerors are apt to regard the conquered 
with mixed feelings, mainly, it is true, with hatred and aversion, 
but in part with reluctant awe. ' The conquerors respect the 
conquered as wizards, familiar with the spirits of the land, and 
employ them for sorcery, sometimes even when relations are 
peaceable employ them as foster-fathers for their sons, yet they 
impute to them every evil and bestial characteristic and believe 
them to take the form of Avild beasts. The conquered for their 
part take refuge in mountain fastnesses and make reprisals in the 
characteristic fashion of Satyrs and Centaurs by carrying off the 
women of their conquerors.' 

Nonnus is again right, it was jealousy that gave to the Satyrs 
their horns, their manes, tusks and tails, but not, as Nonnus 
supposed, the jealousy of Hera, but of primitive conquering man 
who gives to whatever is hurtful to himself the ugly form that 
utters and relieves bis hate^ It should not be hard for us to 

1 Brit. Mus. Cat. b 620. J.H.S. vol. i. pi. ii. p. 132. 

2 Early Age of Greece, vol. i. p. 177. 

^ An analogous case to the Satyrs and Centaurs has already been noted (p. 172), 
i.e. the Keres, regarded as Telcbines, and of monstrous forms; and still more clear 
is the case of the Kyklopes (p. 190), barbarous monsters yet builders and craftsmen. 



vni] Satyrs and Centaurs 385 

realize this impulse ; our own devil, with horns and tail and hoofs, 
(lied hard and recently. 

Most instructive of all as to the real nature of the Centaurs 
and their close analogy to the Satrai-Satyroi is the story of the 
opening of the wine cask. Pindar^ tells how 

'Then when the wild men knew 
The scent of honeyed wine that tames men's souls, 
Straight from the board they thrust the white milk-bowls 
With hurrying bauds, and of their own will flew 
To the horns of silver wrought, 
And drank and were distraught.' 

Storm-clouds and mountain torrents, nay even four-footed 
beasts do not get drunk ; the perfume of wine is for the subduing 
of man alone. The wild things {jyrjpes:) are all human, ' they 
thrust with their hands.' 

The scene is a favourite one on vases. One of the earliest 
representations is given in fig. 120 from a skyphos in the 
Louvre '^ It dates about the beginning of the sixth century B.C. 
The scene is the cave of the Centaur Pholos. The great pithos or 




Fig. 120. 

wine jar is open. Pholos himself has a large wine-cup in his hand. 
Pholos is sober still, he is a sort of Cheiron, but not so the rest. 
They are mad with drink and are hustling and fighting in wild 
confusion. Herakles comes out and tries to restore order. Wine 
has come for the first time to a primitive population unused to so 
strong an intoxicant. The result is the same all over the world. 
A like notion comes out in the popular myth of the wedding feast 
of Peirithoos; the Centaurs taste wine and fall to fighting and in 
Satyr fashion seek to ravish the bride. These stories are of para- 
mount importance because they point the analogy between two 
sets of primitive worshippers of IJionysos, the Centaurs and the 
Satrai-Satyroi. 

1 Pind. frf,'. 44. 
- J. U.S. I. ri. ii. 

H. 25 



386 



Diovjisofi 



[CH. 



To these Satrai-Satyroi we must now return. It is now 
sufficiently clear that, whatever they became to a later imagi- 
nation, to Homer and Pindar and the vase-painters these horse- 
men, these attendants of Dionysos, were not fairies, not ' spirits 
of vegetation,' though from such they may have borrowed many 
traits, but the representatives of an actual primitive popula- 
tion. They owe their monstrous form, their tails, their horses' 
ears and hoofs, not to any desire to express ' powers of fertiliza- 
tion ' but to the malign imagination of their conquerors. They 
are not incarnations of a horse-god Dionysos^ — such a being 
never existed — they are simply Satrai. It is not of course denied 
that they ultimately became mythological, that is indeed indicated 
by the gradual change of form. As a rule the Greek imagination 
tends to anthropomorphism, Tnit here we have a reverse case. 
By lapse of time and gradual oblivion of the historical facts of 
conquest, what was originally a primitive man developes in the 
case of the Centaurs into a mythological horse-demon. 

The Satyrs undergo no such change, they remain substantially 
human. The element of horse varies but is never predominant. 




Fig. 121. 

The form in which there is most horse is well shown in fig. 121. 
This picture is from the reverse of the cylix in the Wiirzburg 
Museum^, on which is depicted the feast of Phineus already 

1 The animal form assumed by Dionysos was (as will later be shown, p. 431) 
that of a bull. Had his own worshippers invented the monstrous Satyrs, they 
would probably have chosen the bull shape. With the horse, Dionysos, unlike 
his attendants, has no affinities. 

- Wiirzburg, No. 354. Mon. d. Inst. x. 8 a. Myth, and Mon. Ancient Athens, 
p. Ixxix. 



Till] Satf/rs and Centaurs 387 

discussed (p. 226). The fact is worth noting that both repre- 
sentations come from a Thracian cycle of mythology. Phineus 
is a Thracian hero, Dionysos a Thracian god. Dionysos stands in 
a chariot to which are yoked a lion and a stag. By his side is a 
woman, probably a goddess, but whether Ariadne or Semele cannot 
certainly be determined, nor for the present argument does it 
matter. The god has stopped to water his steeds at a fountain. 
Satyrs attend him, one is drawing water from the well basin, 
another clambers on the lion's back. Some maidens have bathed 
at the fountain, and are resting under a palm tree, one is just 
struggling back into her clothes. Two prying Satyrs look on 
with evil in their hearts. They are wild men with shaggy bodies, 
rough hair, horses' ears and tails, and they have the somewhat 
exceptional addition of hoofs; the human part of them is closely 
analogous to the shaggy Centaurs of fig. 120. 

The Satyrs are not pleasant to contemplate ; they are ugly in 
form and degraded in habits, and but for a recent theory' it might 
not be needful to emphasize so strongly their nature and functions. 
This theory, which has gained wide and speedy popularity, main- 
tains that the familiar horse-men of black and red figured vases 
are not Satyrs at all. The Satyrs, we are told, are goat-men, the 
horse-men of the vases are Seilenoi. This theory, if true, would 
cut at the root of our whole argument. To deny the identity of 
the horse-men with the Satyrs is to deny their identity with 
the Satrai, i.e. with the primitive population who worshipped 
Dionysos. 

Why then, with the evidence of countless vase-paintings to 
support us, may we not call the horse-men who accompany 
Dionysos Satyrs ? Because, we are told, tragedy is the goat-song, 
the goat-song gave rise to the Satyric drama, hence the Satyrs 
must be ^roai-demons, hence they cannot be /«orse-denions, hence 
the Aorse-demons of vases cannot be Satyrs, hence another 
name must be found for them. On the Franyois-vase (fig. 114) 
the horse-demons are inscribed Seilenoi, hence let the name 
Seilenoi be adopted for all /i07-6'e-demons. Be it observed that 
the whole complex structure rests on the philological assumption 
that tragedy means the goat-song. What tragedy really does oi- 

' The literature of this controversy is fully given ami discussed by Dr K. Wernicke, 
' BockschiJre und Satyrdrania,' Ucriuen xxxii. 1«97, p. 2'J. 

25—2 



388 Dlonysos [ch. 

at least may mean will be considered later (p. 420) ; for the 

present the point is only raised because I hold to the view now 

discredited^ that the familiar throng of idle disreputable vicious 

horse-vciQw who constantly on vases attend Dionysos, who drink 

and sport and play and harry women, are none other than 

Hesiod's^ 

' race 
Of worthless idle Satyrs.' 

That they are also called Seilenoi I do not for a moment deny. 
In different lands their names were diverse. 



The Maenads. 

It is refreshing to turn from the dissolute crew of Satyrs to 
the women-attendants of Dionysos, the Maenads. These Maenads 
are as real, as actual as the Satyrs ; in fact more so, for no poet or 
painter ever attempted to give them horses' ears and tails. And 
yet, so persistent is the dislike to commonplace fact, timt we 
are repeatedly told that the Maenads are purely mythological 
creations and that the Maenad orgies never appear historically in 
Greece. 

It would be a mistake to regard the Maenads as the mere 
female correlatives of the Satyrs. The Satyrs, it has been seen, are 
representations of a primitive subject people, but the Maenads do 
not represent merel}' the women of the same race. Their name is 
the corruption of no tribal name, it represents a state of mind and 
bod}', it is almost a cultus-epithet. Maenad means of course 
simply ' mad woman,' and the Maenads are the women-worshippers 
of Dionysos of whatever race, possessed, maddened or, as the 
ancients would say, inspired by his spirit. 

Maenad is only one, though perhaps the most common, of the 
many names applied to these worshipping women. In Macedonia 
Plutarch^ tells us they were called Mimallones and Klodones, in 
Greece, Bacchae, Bassarides, Thyiades, Potniades and the like. 

1 Since the above was written I see with great pleasure that Dr Emil Reisch in 
his article 'Zur Vorgeschichte der attischen Tragodie' (Fext.schrift Theodor Gomperz 
1902, 13. 459) reasserts the old view that the horse-demons of the vases are Satyrs. 

- Hes. frg. CXXI3C 

•' Pint; Vit. Alex. 2. For many references as to the Maenads I am indebted to 
the articles by Dr A. Eapp, 'Die Maenade in gr. Cultus in der Kunst und Poesie,' 
lihein. Mas. 1872, pp. 1 and 562, and for references to the Thyiades to Dr Weniger's 
Das Collegium der Thyiaden. 



yni] TJte Maenads 889 

Some of the titles crystallized into something like proper names, 
others remained consciously adjectival. At bottom they all ex- 
press the same idea, women possessed by the spirit of Dionysos. 

Plutarch in his charming discourse on Superstition' tells how 
when the dithja-ambic poet Timotheos was chanting a hymn to 
Artemis he addressed the daughter of Zeus thus : 
' Maeuad, Thyiad, Phoibad, Lj'-ssad.' 

The titles may be Englished as Mad One, Rushing One, In- 
spired One, Raging One. Cinesias the lyric poet, whose own songs 
were doubtless couched in language less orgiastic, got up and said : 
' I wish you may have such a daughter of your own.' The story 
is instructive on two counts. It shows first that Maenad and 
Thyiad were at the date of Timotheos so adjectival, so little 
crystallized into proper names, that they could be applied not 
merely to the worshippers of Dionysos, but to any orgiastic 
divinity, and second the passage is clear evidence that educated 
people, towards the close of the fifth century B.C., were beginning 
to be at issue with their own theological conceptions. Cultus 
practices however, and still more cultus epithets, lay far behind 
educated opinion. It is fortunately possible to prove that the 
epithet Thyiad certainly and the epithets Phoibad and Maenad 
probably, were applied to actually existing historical women. 
The epithet Lyssad, which means ' raging mad,' was not likely 
to prevail out of jDoetry. The chorus in the Bacchae- call them- 
selves ' swift hounds of raging Madness,' but the title was not 
one that would appeal to respectable matrons. 

We begin with the Thyiades. It is at Delphi that we learn 

most of their nature and worship, J^elphi where high on Parnassos 

Dionysos held his orgies. Thus much even Aeschylus, though he 

is 'all for Apollo,' cannot deny. To this he makes the priestess^ 

in her ceremonial recitation of local powers bear almost reluctant 

witness : 

' Vou too I salute, 
Ye nymphs about Korykia's caverned rock, 
Kindly to ])ii'dH, liauiit of divinities. 
And jji'oniio.s, I forgot not, holds the place, 
Since first to war he led his Bacchanals, 
And scattered I'ciithens, like a riven hare.' 

1 Plut. dc Supemtit. x. 

MaLvdda OvMa <I>ot/yd5a AvaadSa. 
* Eur. Bacch. 977. =* Aesch. I-:uin. 22. 



390 



D low/ SOS 



[CH. 



Aeschylus \ intent on monotheism, would fain know only the 
two divinities who were really one, i.e. Zeus and 
'Loxias utterer of his father's will,' 

the Father and the Son, these and the line of ancient Earth- 
divinities to whom they were heirs. But religious tradition knew 
of another immigrant, Dionysos, and Aescliylus cannot wholly 
ignore him. On the pediments of the great temple were 
sculptured at one end, Pausanias- tells us, Apollo, Artemis, 
Leto and the Muses, and at the other ' the setting of the sun 
and Dionysos with his Thyiad women.' The ritual year at Delphi 
was divided, as will later be seen, between Apollo and Dionysos. 

The vase-painting in fig. 122 from a krater in the Hermitage 
Museum at St Petersburg' is a brief epitome of the religious 




Fig. 122. 



history of Delphi, marking its three strata. In the foreground is 

the omphalos of Gaia covered with fillets : 

'First in my prayer before all other gods 
I call on Earth, primaeval prophetess*,' 

Gaia, of whom her successors Themis and Phoebe are but by- 
forms. Higher up in the picture are other divinities superimposed 
on this primitive Earth-worship. Apollo and Dionysos clasp hands 
while about them is a company of Maenads and Satyrs. It is 



^ Aescb. Eu7n. 19. 

=* Hermitage, Cat. 1807. 



■ P. X. 19. 3. 
■* Aeseh. Eum. 1. 



Yin] The. Maenads 891 

perhaps not quite certain which is regarded as the first comer, 
but the balance is in favour of Dionysos as the sanctuary is 
ah-eady peopled with his worshippers. His dress has about it 
something of Oriental splendour as compared with the Hellenic 
simplicity of Apollo. Each carries his characteristic wand, Apollo 
a branch of bay, Dionysos a thyrsos. 

In this vase-painting, which dates about the beginning of the 
fourth century B.C., all is peace and harmony and clasped hands. 
The Delphic priesthood were past masters in the art of glossing 
over awkward passages in the history of theology. Apollo had to 
fight with the ancient mantic serpent of Gaia and slay it before 
he could take possession, and we may be very sure that at one 
time or another there was a struggle between the followers of 
Apollo and the followers of Dionysos. Over this past which was 
not for edification a decent veil was drawn \ 

A religion which conquered Delphi practically conquered the 
whole Greek world. It was probably at Delphi, no less than at 
Athens, that the work of reforming, modifying, adapting the rude 
Thracian worship was effected, a process necessary to commend 
the new cult to the favour of civilized Greece. If then we can 
establish the historical actuality of the Thyiads at Delphi we 
need not hesitate to believe that they, or their counterparts, 
existed in the worship of Dionysos elsewhere. 

Pausanias' when he was at Panopeus was puzzled to know 
why Homer spoke of the ' fair dancing grounds ' of the place. The 
reason he says was explained to him by the women whom the 
Athenians call Thyiades. He adds, that there may be no mistake, 
' these Thyiads are Attic women who go every other year with 
the Delphian women to Parnassos and there hold orgies in honour 
of Dionysos. On their way they stopped to dance at Panopeus, 
hence Homer's epithet.' Of course this college of sacred women, 
these Thyiades, were provided with an eponymous ancestress, Thyia. 
She is mythological. Pausanias^ says in discussing the origin of 
Delphi that ' some would have it that there was a man called 

' Hee Dr Verrall, Kuripidcs the liationalht, p. '22H. The same theolo^jical 
euphemism is observable in the Hymn to Dionysos recently discovered at Delphi 
and which will be discussed later (p. 41f;). Here there is a manifest attempt to 
fuse tVie worship of Apollo and Dionysos. Dionysos even adopts the characteristic 
ApoUine title of Paean. 

-■ P. X. 4. 2. ' P. X. fi. 2. 



392 Dionysos [ch. 

Castalius, an aboriginal, who had a daughter Thyia, and that she 
was the first priestess of Dionysos and held orgies in honour of 
the god, and they say that afterwards all women who were mad 
in honour of Dionysos have been called Thyiades after her ' {oaai 
Tc5 Aiovvaoi fxaivovrai (&vLd8a<i KaXeiaOal (paaiv vtto dvOpcoiroiv). 
If 'those who are mad in honour of Dionysos' are not substantially 
Maenads, it is hard to say Avhat they are. It is fortunate that 
Pausanias saw and spoke to these women or else his statement^ 
that they raved upon the topmost peaks of Parnassos in honour of 
Dionysos and Apollo would have been explained away as mere 
mythology. 

Plutarch was a priest in his own Chaeronea and intimately 
acquainted with the ritual of Delphi, and a great friend of his, 
Klea, was president {dp')^7]j6s) of the Thyiades at Delphi-. He 
mentions them more than once. In writing to Favorinus^ on 
' the First Principle of Cold ' he argues that cold has its own 
special and proper qualities, density, stability, rigidity, and gives 
as an instance the cold of a winter's night out on Parnassos. 
' You have heard yourself at Delphi how the people who went up 
Parnassos to bring help to the Thyiades were overtaken by a 
violent gale with snow, and their coats were frozen as hard as 
wood, so that when they were stretched out they crumbled and 
fell to bits.' The crumbling coats sound apocryphal, but the 
Thyiades out in the cold are quite real. You do not face a 
mountain snow-storm to succour the mythological ' spirits of the 
spring.' 

It may have been from his friend Klea that Plutarch learnt the 
pleasant story of the Thyiades and the women of Phocis, which 
he records in his treatise on the 'Virtues of Women^' 'When the 
tyrants of Phocis had taken Delphi and undertook against them 
what was known as the Sacred War, the women who attended 
Dionysos whom they call Thyiades being distraught wandered out 

1 P. X. 32. 7. 

^ De Is. et Os. 35. Herodotus (vii. 178) mentions an altar of the winds at Delphi 
in a place called Thyia, the temenos of the heroine, who may herself have been a 
raging wind. The same precinct, we know from an inscription found at Delphi, 
was called Thyiai. See E. Bourguet, Melanges Perrot, j). 25, and for the wind and 
storm aspect of Thyia see Dr Weniger's interesting discussion in 'Feralis Exercitus,' 
Archiv f. Religionswissenschaft, 1907, pp. 70 and 81. He rightly lays stress on 
the connection between Thyia and dveWa and 'OpelBvia mountain-wind, bride of 
Boreas the tramoiitana. 

* Plut. de prill, frig, xviii. ^ Plut. de mul. virt. xiii. 



Till] The Maenads 393 

of their way and came without knowing it to Amphissa. And 
being very weary and not yet having come to their right mind 
they flung themselves down in the agora and fell asleep anyhow 
where they lay. And the women of Amphissa were afraid lest, as 
their city had made an alliance with the Phocians and the place 
was full of the soldiery of the tyrants, the Thyiades might suffer 
some harm. And they left their houses and ran to the agora and 
made a ring in silence round them a.nd stood there without dis- 
turbing them as they slept, and when they woke up they severally 
tended them and brought them food and finally got leave from 
their husbands to set them on their way in safety as far as the 
mountains.' These Thyiades are the historical counterparts of the 
Maenads of countless vases and bas-reliefs, the same mad revelry, 
the same utter exhaustion and prostrate sleep. They are the 
same too as the Bacchant Women of Euripides' on the slopes of 

Cithaeron : 

' There, beneath the trees 
Sleeping they lay, like wild things flung at ease 
In the forest, one half sinking on a bed 
Of deep pine greenery, one with careless head 
Amid the fallen oak-leaves.' 

In the reverence shown by the women of Amphissa we see 
that though the Thyiades were real women they were something 
more than real. 

This brings us to another of the cultus titles enumerated 
by Timotheos, ' Phoibad.' Phoibas is the female correlative of 
Phoebus, a title we are apt to associate exclusively with Apollo. 
Apollo, Liddell and Scott say, was called Phoebus because of the 
purity and radiant beauty of youth. The epithet has more to do 
with purity than with radiant beauty ; if with beauty at all it is 
' the beauty of holines.s.' Plutarch in discussing this title of 
Apollo makes the following interesting statement- : ' The ancients, 
it seems to me, called everything that was pure and sanctified 
2)hoebic as the Thessalians still, I believe, say of their priests when 
they are living in seclusion apai't on certain prescribed days that 
they are living phoebically.' The meaning of this passage, which 
is practically untranslateable, is clear. The root of the word 

' Eur. liacch. 08.S. 

'■^ Plut. de FA a]iu(l Deljili. xx. 1 ']'oifiov oh bq irov t6 KaOapov Kal ci7i'6«' oi 
TTaXaiol irav ihvbixa'inv lij in 0((raa\ol to^s iepdas iv rah diro())pd<TLV irjixipaii avroiis i<j) 
iavrOiv i^u biaTpl^ovras olnai (l^oidovonfladai, see J. U.S. xix. p. 'ill. 



394 Diont/sos [ch. 

Phoebus meant ' in a condition of ceremonial purity, holy in a 

ritual sense,' and as such specially inspired by and under the 

protection of the god, under a taboo. Apollo probably took over 

his title of Phoebus from the old order of women divinities to 

whom he succeeded. Third in order of succession after Gaia and 

Themis 1 : 

'Another Titaness, daughter of Ejirth, 
Phoebe, possessed it, and for birthday gift 
To Phoebus gave it, and he took her name.' 

Apollo, we may be sure, did not get his birthday gift without 
substantial concessions. He took the name of the ancient Phoebe, 
daughter of earth, nay more he was forced, woman-hater as he 
always was, to utter his oracles through the mouth of a raving 
woman-priestess, a Phoibas. Herodotus in the passage already 
quoted (p. 369) justly observed that in the remote land of the 
Bessi as at Delphi oracular utterance was by the mouth of a 
priestess. Kassandra was another of these women-prophetesses of 
Gaia. She prophesied at the altar-omphalos of Thymbrae, a 
shrine Apollo took over as he took Delphi-. Her frenzy against 
Apollo is more than the bitterness of maiden betrayed ; it is the 
wrath of the prophetess of the old order discredited, despoiled 
by the new ; she breaks her wand and rends her fillets and 
cries ^ : 

' Lo now the seer the seeress hath undone.' 

The priestess at Delphi, though in intent a Phoibas, was 
called the Pythia, but the official name of the priestess Kassandra 
was, we know, Phoibas^ : 

'The Phoibas whom the Phrygians call Kassandra,' 

and the title, ' she who is ceremonially pure,' lends a bitter irony 
to Hecuba's words of shame. 

The word Phoibades is never, so far as I know, actually applied 
to definite Bacchantes, though I believe its use at Delphi to be 
due to Dionysiac influence, but another epithet Potniades points 

1 Aesch. Eu)n. 6. 

2 On a curious -Tyrrhenian' amphora (Gerhard, Auserlesene Vasenbilder 220), 
the scene of the slaying of Troilos is represented. This took place according to 
tradition in the Thymbraean sanctuary. The sanctuary is indicated by a regular 
omphalos covered by a fillet and against it is inscribed ;3w/t6s. 

^ Aesch. Ag. 1275. 
4 Eur. Hec. 827 

7] ^otjSaj rji' KoXovcri Kaaffdvdpav ^p^yes. 



viii] The Maenads 395 

the same way. In the Bacchae^, when the messenger returns 

from Cithaeron, he says to Pentheus : 

' I have seen the wild white women there, O king, 
Whose fleet limbs darted arrow-like bnt now 
From Thebes away, and come to tell thee how 
They work strange deeds.' 

The ' wild white women ' are in a hieratic state of holy mad- 
ness, hence their miraculous magnetic powers. Photius" has a 
curious note on the verb with which ' Potniades ' is connected. He 
says its normal use was to express a state in which a woman 
' suffered something and entreated a goddess ' and ' if any one 
used the word of a man he was inaccurate.' By ' suffering some- 
thing' he can only mean that she was possessed by the goddess 
{evdeo^ or KaTo-^o<^), and he may have the Maenads and kindred 
worshippers in his mind. Madness could be caused by the Mother 
of the gods or by Dionysos, in fact by any orgiastic divinity. 

It may possibly be objected that Maenads are not the same 
as either Thyiades or Phoibades. My point is that they are. 
The substantial basis of the conception is the actual women- 
worshippers of the god ; out of these were later created his 
mythical attendants. Such is the natural order of mythological 
genesis. Diodorus'' like most modern mythologists inverts this 
natural sequence, and his inversion is instructive. In describing 
the triumphal return of Dionysos from India he says: 'And the 
Boeotians and the other Greeks and the Thracians in memory of 
the Indian expedition instituted the biennial sacrifices to Dionysos 
and they hold that at these intervals the god makes his epiphanies 
to mortals. Hence in many towns of Greece every alternate 
year Bacchanalian assemblies of women come together and it is 
customary for maidens to carry the thyrsos and to revel together 
to the honour and glory of the god, and the married women 
worship the god in organized bands and they revel, and in every 
way celebrate the presence of Dionysos in imitation of the 

1 Eur. J'.acch. fJG4 

^d/cxds iroTfiddas elaidJjv, at rriffSe yrjs 
oiarpoiai. \tvKhv kQXov it.rjKlivri(Tav. 
.Mr Murrsiy'H translation preserves the twofold connotation of the word, purity and 
inspired madness. 

■■' I'hot. liihl. V. 58a*' OTi rb TTOTViaaOai Kvpubrepov M yvvaiKas TixTTtTaL <l>r\<jiv^ orav 
KaK6v TL ndffxri k^I dT}\i'ia.v iKiTior) Oiov. woTviiSinivov oi dfopa &v Tis dwj} anapravfi. 
•* Died. IV. '^. 



396 Bionysos [CH. 

Maenads who from of old, it was said, constantly attended the 

god.' Diodorus is an excellent instance of mistaken mytho- 

logizing. Mythology invents a reason for a fact, does not base 

a fact on a fancy. 

It is not denied for a moment that the Maenads became 

mythical. When Sophocles sings^: 

' Footless, sacred, shadowy thicket, where a myriad berries grow, 
Where no heat of the sun may enter, neither wind of the winter blow, 
Where the Reveller Dionysos with his nursing nymphs will go,' 

we are not in this world, and his nursing nymphs are ' goddesses ' ; 
but they are goddesses fashioned here as always in the image of 
man who made them. 

The difficulty and the discrepancy of opinion as to the reality 
of the Maenads are due mainly to a misunderstanding about words. 
Maenad is to us a proper name, a fixed and crystallized personality ; 
so is Tliyiad, but in the beginning it was not so. Maenad is the 
Mad One, Thyiad the Rushing Distraught One or something of 
that kind, anyhow^ an adjectival epithet. Mad One, Distraught 
One, Pure One are simply ways of describing a woman under the 
influence of a god, of Dionysos. Thyiad and Phoibad obtained as 
cultus names, Maenad tended to go over to mythology. Perhaps 
naturally so ; when a people becomes highly civilized madness is 
apt not to seem, save to poets and philosophers, the divine thing 
it really is, so they tend to drop the mad epithet and the colour- 
less Thyiad becomes more and more a proper name. 

Still Maenad, as a name of actual priestly women, was not 
wholly lost. An inscription- of the date of Hadrian, found in 
Magnesia and now in the Tschinli Kiosk at Constantinople, gives 
curious evidence. This inscription recounts a little miracle-story. 
A plane tree was shattered by a storm, inside it was found an 
image of Dionysos ^ Seers were promptly sent to Delphi to ask 
what was to be done. The answer was, as might be expected, 
the Magnesians had neglected to build ' fair wrought temples ' to 
Dionysos ; they must repair their fault. To do this properly they 

1 Oed. Col. fi70, trans, by Mr D. S. MacColl. 

2 First published by Kondolleon, Ath. Mitt. xv. (1890) p. 330, discussed by 
E. Maass, Hermes xxvi. (1891) p. 178, and S. Eeinach, Rev. des Etudes grecques 
III. (1890) p. 349, and 0. Kern, Beitrdge zur Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie 
und Religion, Berlin 1895. 

•^ d(pei5pvfj.a Aiovvaov. 



Yiii] The Maenads 397 

must send to Thebes and thence obtain three Maenads of the 
family of Kadmean Ino\ These would give to the Magnesians 
orgies and right customs. They went to Thebes and brought 
back three ' Maenads ' whose names are given, Kosko, Baubo and 
Thettale ; and they came and founded three thiasoi or sacred 
guilds in three parts of the city. The inscription is of course 
late ; Baubo- and Kosko are probably Orphic, but the main issue 
is clear : in the time of Hadrian at least three actual women of a 
particular family were called '31aenads.' 

We are so possessed by a set of conceptions based on Periclean 
Athens, by ideas of law and order and reason and limit, that we 
are apt to dismiss as ' mythological ' whatever does not fit into our 
stereotyped picture. The husbands and brothers of the women of 
historical days would not, we are told, have allowed their women 
to rave upon the mountains ; it is unthinkable taken in conjunction 
with the strict oriental seclusion of the Periclean woman. That 
any woman might at any moment assume the liberty of a Maenad 
is certainly unlikely, but much is borne even by husbands and 
brothers when sanctioned by religious tradition. The men even 
of Macedonia, where manners were doubtless ruder, did not like 
the practice of Bacchic orgies. Bacchus came emphatically not to 
bring peace. Plutarch'' conjectures that these Bacchic orgies had 
much to do with the strained relations between the father and 
mother of Alexander the Great. A snake had been seen' lying by 
the side of Olympias and Philip feared she was practising en- 
chantments, or worse, that the snake was the vehicle of a god. 
Another and probably the right explanation of the presence of 
the snake was, as Plutarch tells us, that 'all the women of that 
country had been from ancient days under the dominion of Orphic 
rites and Dionysiac orgies, and that they were called Klodones and 
Mimallones because in many respects they imitated the Edonian 
and Thracian women round about Haemus, from whom the Greek 
word 6pr)a-Keveiv seems to come, a word which is applied to 
excessive and overdone ceremonials. Now Olympias was more 

^laivdoas ai 7<ve^s EtVoPj dnb Had/xTjeL-q^. 

at o' vixiv bihaovai Kal opyia Kai vdfufi' iaOXd. 
'^ For the very primitive signiliciuice of Baubo see Diels, Arcana Cerealia iu 
Misicellania di Archeologia l'J07. 
•■ riul. Vit. Alex. 2. 



398 



Dionysos 



[CH. 



zealous than all the rest and carried out these rites of possession 
and ecstasy in very barbarous fashion and introduced huge tame 
serpents into the Bacchic assemblies, and these kept creeping out 
of the ivy and the mystic likna and twining themselves round the 
thyrsoi of the women and their garlands, and fnghtening the men 
out of their senses! 

However much the Macedonian men disliked these orgies, they 
were clearly too frightened to put a stop to them. The women 
Avere possessed, magical, and dangerous to handle. Scenes such 




Fig. 123. 



as those described by Plutarch as actually taking place in Mace- 
donia are abundantly figured on vases. The beautiful raging 
Maenad in fig. 123 from the centre of a cylix with white ground 



VIIl] 



TJie Maenads 



399 



at Munich^ is a fine example. She wears the typical Maenad 
garb, the fawn-skin over her regular drapery ; she carries the 
thyrsos, she carries in fact the whole gear (cr/ceu/;) of Dionysos. 
When Pentheus would counterfeit a Bacchant he is attired just 
so ; he wears the long trailing chiton and over it the dappled fawn- 
skin, his hair flows loose, in his hand is the thyrsos. For snood 
i/jLLTpa) in her hair the Maenad has twined a great snake. 
Another Maenad'- is shown in fig. 124. She is characterized only 




Fig. 124. 



by the two snakes she holds in her hand. But for her long full 
drapery she might be an Erinys. 

The snakes emerging from the sacred cistae are illustrated 
by the class of coins^ known as cistophoroi, a specimen of which 










Fig. 125. 

is reproduced in fig. 125. These coins, of which the type is 
uniform, originated, according to Dr Imhoof, in Ephesus a little 

1 Munich. Jalin, Cat. ;J82. Greek Vane Paintingx, J. E. Harriaou and D. S. 
MacColl, pi. XV. Baumeister, Ab. 928. 
- J.H.S. XIX. p. 220, fig. 6. 
=' Head, Hist. Num. p. 4G1, fig. 287. 



400 Dionysos [ch. 

before B.C. 200, and spread through all the dominions of Attalos 
the First. They illustrate a phase of Dionysos worship in Asia 
Minor closely akin to that of Macedonia. 

Macedonia is not Athens, but the reforms of Epimenides allow 
us to divine that Athenian brothers and husbands also had their 
difficulties. Plutarch' again is our informant. Athens was beset 
by superstitious fears and strange appearances. They sent to 
Crete for Epimenides, a man beloved of the gods and skilled in 
the technicalities of religion, especially as regards enthusiastic and 
mystic rites. He and Solon made friends and the gist of his 
religious reforms was this: ' he simplified their religious rites, and 
made the ceremonies of mourning milder, introducing certain forms 
of sacrifice into their funeral solemnities and abolishing the cruel 
and barbarous elements to which the women were addicted. But 
most important of all, by lustrations and expiations and the found- 
ings of worships he hallowed and consecrated the city and made 
it subserve justice and be more inclined to unity.' The passage is 
certainly not as explicit as could be wished, but the words used — 
KaTopyidaa<i and Ka6ocricoaa<; — and the fact that Epimenides was 
an expert in ecstatic rites, that they gave him the name of the 
new Koures, the special attention paid to the rites of women, 
though they are mentioned in relation to funerals, make it fairly 
clear that some of the barbarous excesses were connected with 
Bacchic orgies. This becomes more probable when we remember 
that many of Solon's own enactments were directed against the 
excesses of women. ' He regulated,' Plutarch^ tells us, ' the out- 
goings of women, their funeral lamentations and their festivals, 
forbidding by law all disorder and excess.' Among these dreary 
regulations comes the characteristically modern touch that they 
are not to go out at night ' except in a carriage and with a light 
before them.' It was the going out at night that Pentheus could 
not bear^. When he would know what were the rites of Dio- 
nysos he asks the god : 

' P. How is this worship held, by night or day ? 
D. Most oft by night, 'tis a majestic thing 

The Darkness. 
P. Ha, with women worshipping? 

'Tis craft and rottenness.' 

1 Plut. Vit. Sol. XII. Epimenides is as it were a historical Orpheus. Coming 
from Crete, he, like Orpheus (p. 459), modified Dionysiac ritual. 

2 Plut. Vit. Sol. XXI. 3 Eur. Bacch. 485. 



vin] Dioiii/sos Likriites 401 

DiONYSOS LiKNITES. 

The Maenads theii are the frenzied sanctified women who are 
devoted to the worship of Dionysos. But they are something 
more; they tend the god as well as suffer his inspiration. When 
first we catch sight of them in Homer (p. 367) they are his 
'nurses' {ridrivat). One of the lost plays of Aeschylus bore the 
title 'Rearer of Dionysos,' and Sophocles \ here as so often inspired 
by Homer, makes his chorus sing : 

' There the reveller Dionysos with his nursing nymphs doth go.' 

In Homer and Aeschylus and Sophocles, though Dionysos has 
his goddess nurses, he is himself no nursling. A child no longer, 
he revels with them as coevals. Mythology has half forgotten the 
ritual from which it sprang. Fortunately Plutarch- has left us 
an account, inadequate but still significant, of the actual ritual of 
the Thyiades^, and from it we learn that they worshipped and 
tended no full-grown god, but a baby in his cradle. 

Plutarch is speaking of the identity of Osiris and Dionysos, 
both being embodiments according to him of the ' moist principle.' 
' You, Klea,' he says, ' if any one, should know that Osiris is the 
same as Dionysos, you who are leader of the Thyiades at Delphi 
and w^ere initiated by your father and mother into the rites of 
Osiris.' After pointing out varioiis analogies, he adds : ' For the 
Egyptians, as has been said, point out tombs of Osiris in many 
places, and the Delphians hold that tliey possess the relics of 
Dionysos buried by the side of their oracular shrine; the Hosioi 
make a secret sacrifice in the sacred precinct of Apollo luhen tlie 
Thyiades raise up Liknites.' It will later (p. 482) be seen that 
Dionysos was represented in ritual as slain and dismembered ; 
from this passage it is clear that there was some sort of resur- 
rection of the god, a new birth as a little child. Liknites can be 
none other than the babe in the cradle. Hesychius in commenting 
on the word Liknites says: *a title of Dionysos from the cradle in 
which they put children to sleep.' In primitive agricultui-al days, 

1 Oed. Col. 674, see p. 368. 

- De laid, et Os. xxxv. Kal Ovovctlv ol "Oaioi dixriav dirdpprjTov iv n^ lepif tov 
'AndWuvos orav at GutdSes eydpucn tov AiKviTriv. 

■^ The verb dvLui is used of the excited beating of the heart under strong emotion, 
e.g. Ap. lihod. III. 754 

TTVKva 5^ oi Kpahir) arrjdiwv ivToadev idvuv. 

H. 26 



402 Dionysos [ch. 

the lihion, a shovel-shaped basket, served three purposes : it was a 
' fan ' with which to winnow grain, it was a basket to hold grain 
or fruit or sacred objects, it was a cradle for a baby. The various 
forms of lihna and the beautiful mysticism that gathered round 
the cradle and the winnowing fan, will be considered when Orphic 
ceremonial is discussed (p. 517). For the present it is enough 
to note that the ceremony of raising or waking Liknites marks 
clearly the worship of a child-god. 

The worship by women of Liknites, of the child in the cradle, 
reflects a primitive stage of society, a time when the main realized 
function of woman was motherhood and the more civilized, less 
elemental, function of wedded wife was scarcely adventured. It is 
at once a cardinal point and a primary note in the mythology of 
Dionysos that he is the son of his mother. The religion of the 
Mother and the Daughter is already familiar (p. 271); it reflected, 
as has been seen, primarily not so much the relations of mother 
and daughter as the two stages of woman's life, woman as maid, 
and woman as mother. If we are to have the relation of parent 
and child mirrored in mythology, assuredly the closest relation 
is not that even of mother and daughter but of mother and son. 
Father and son, Zeus and Apollo, reflect a still further advance 
in civilization. 

Before leaving the Thyiades, it is important to note that they 
had a cult not only of Liknites, the child in the cradle, but of the 
mother who bore him, Semele, and this too at Delphi. Plutarch 
is again our authority. In his Greek Questions'^, he treats of the 
three great enneateric festivals of Delphi, the Stepterion, Herois 
and Charila. Of the Herois he says : ' Its inner meaning is for 
the most part mystical as is known to the Thyiades, but from the 
rites that are openly performed one may conjecture that it is a 
Return of Semele.' Plutarch's conjecture was undoubtedly right. 
The Herois was a resurrection festival, with rites of Return and 
Uprising, such as have been already (p. 277) fully discussed in 
relation to Demeter and Kore. 

The relation of Dionysos to his father Zeus was slight and 
artificial. He is, as aforesaid, essentially the son of his mother, 

^ Plut. Q. Gr. XII. TTjS Si Hpwtoos ra irXeicrTa fivcrnKov ^x^'- ^oyov dv 'liaaaiv al 
©wdSes, €K 5e tC'v dpio/xevui' (pavepuis ^efx^Xyj? dv ris avayuy-rju eiKacreie. 



vm] Dionysos Son of Seinele 403 

'child of Semele\' The meaning of the fatherhood of Zeus and 
the strange hieratic legend of the double bii'th will be discussed 
later: the question must first be asked 'Who is Semele?' 



DioxYsos Sox OF Semele. 

Dionysos, we have seen, was a Thraciaa; if his mother can be 
shown to be Thracian too, each will confirm the other. The 
certain remains of the Phrygio-Thracian tongue are but scanty, 
happily however they sufiSce for the certain interpretation of the 
name Semele. 

Prof Ramsay in his Phrygian explorations- has brought to 
light a number of inscriptions from tombs which run after this 
fashion : 

St; Stcos ff/xeXo). 

8eos K6 fe^(eXc()). 
/Lie ^e/LieXco. 

These various permutations and combinations are followed by 
a curse formulary as follows: to? aefiovv Kvovfiavei KaKovv aSSaKet 
€TtTTerLKfxevo<i etrov, which is Phrygian for o? tovto) (tm) fiv^jfjuari 
KUKov eTredrjKe viroKardparo'i earw, ' Cursed be he that does any 
damage to this tomb.' The inscriptions, which all date after the 
Christian era, belong to a time when the well-to-do classes spoke 
and wrote Greek, but, in the case of a curse, it was well to couch 
your inscription in a tongue understanded of the people. yu.e and 
87; would appear to be affirmative curse particles ; fie has for 
cognates fid, firjv and possibly fiev, as well as the Latin me in me 
Hercle, me Dius Fidius. Btj is cognate not only to the ordinary 
affirmative Greek Bi] but also to the de of the Latin oath e-de-pol. 
The divinities sworn by remain to be considered. Brj Stw? can 
scarcely be other than vrj Ata, ' by Zeus.' ^e/AeXeo at once brings 

^ Eur. Bacch. 375 tov Bpofj-iov 

Tov 2e/xAas. 
V. 580 6 2e/iAas, 

6 Atos Trats. 
V. 278 6 "ZefiiXris yovos. 

'- Ramsay, Journal of Aniatic Sac. xv. 1883, pp. 120 ff., and Latischew, Fiir 
vergleichende Sprachforschung, vol. xxviii. pp. 381 ff. The inscriptions are ex- 
plained and discussed in relation to Semele by Dr Paul Kretschmer, ' Semele 
und Dionysos,' in Aus der Anoviia (Berlin 1890), and to him I owe entirely the 
view adopted in the text. 

26—2 



404 



Dionysos 



[CH. 



Semele to mind. But who and what is Semele ? Phrygian and 
Thracian are now admitted to belong to the Indo-European family 
of languages, and a conjoint consonantal characteristic of the two 
is that they replace the palatals g and gh (Greek 7 and ^) by a 
spirant ; this spirant the Greeks rendered indifferently by their 
nearest equivalents ^ and a. The Phrygian ^e/xeXco is the Greek 
yrj (earth) appearing in nasalized form as 'x^afxai, 'x^9afiaX6<i, %^&)i/, 
in Latin as humus, humilis, homo, in Sclavonic, to quote only a 
familiar and convincing instance, in Nova Zemhla, ' new earth.' 
The Greek form 7^ looks remote but we have also its nasalized 
form X.a/jbvvr} (Lit. Zemyna). At Elis Pausanias^ saw, opposite the 
j)lace where the umpires stood, an altar of white marble. On 
that altar sat the priestess of Demeter Chamyne, to behold the 
Olympic games. ' She of the Ground ' was probably at Olympia 
long before the coming of Zeus. 

Semele, mother of Dionysos, is the Earth. This the vase- 
painter knew well. In dealing with the Earth-Mother (p. 276) a 
number of vase-paintings have been considered, in which Kore, the 




Fig. 126. 



earth in her young form as maiden, has been seen represented as 
rising out of the actual earth she really is. To these as counter- 
part must now be added the curious vase-painting in fig. 126, now 



1 P. VI. 20. 9. 



nil] 



Dfonj/sos Son of Semele 



405 



in the Hope collection at Deep-dene\ Out of the earth-mound 
rises a youthful figure, a male Kore; he holds a sceptre as king 
and is welcomed, or rather heralded, by a little winged Nike. 
His worshippers await him : a Maenad with thyrsos and tray of 
offerings to the right, a Satyr also with thyrsos to the left. The 
rising figure can be none other than the child of Semele, the 
earth-Dionysos himself It is rash, I think, to give the rising god 
any special name, to call him lacchos or Brimos ; all we can be 
sure that the vase-painter meant was that the god is earth-born. 

The same notion comes clearly out in the second design in 
fig. 127 from a kalpis in the British Museum'-. Here the familiar 
type^ of the birth of Erichthonios from the earth is taken over 
and adapted to the birth of Dionysos, The vase-painter thus in 




Fig. 127. 

instructive fashion assimilates the immigrant stranger to his own 
heroic mythology. Ge is rising from the earth; she presents, not 
Erichthonios, but another sacred child to a foster-mother, Athene. 
It is certainly probable that the child is Dionysos, not Erichthonios, 

1 I regret to be obliged to reproduce the publication of Tiscbbein {Greek Vases 
I. 39). As regards style it is obviously inadequate. The vase has been examined 
by Mr Cecil Smith {Jahrhiich d. Inst. 1891, p. 120, note 17) and the reproduction 
of Tiscbbein is pronounced by him to be as regards subject-matter substantially 
correct. 

- B.M. Cat. vol. III. E 182, cf. C. Robert, Archaolor/Lsche Miirchen 161. 
Dr Kobert explains the vase as the birth of Dionysos from the well-nymph Dirce, 
but vase-paintings offer no analogy to the representation of a well-nymph as a 
figure rising from the ground. 

■* Cf. Myth, and Mon. Aiic. Athens, p. xxxix. 



406 



Diom/sos 



[CH. 



for the maiden who in such familiar fashion leans on the shoulder 
of Zeus is inscribed ' Wine-bloom,' Oiuanthe. Zeus himself with his 
thunderbolt is a reminiscence of the thunder-smitten birth. On 
authentic representations of the birth of Erichthonios, Hephaistos, 
his putative father, is present, not Zeus. As in fig. 126 the new- 
born hero is welcomed by a winged Victory, who brings a taenia 
to crown him. It is clear that the vase-painter wants to make 
the new-born child as Athenian as possible, almost to substitute 
him for the autochthonous Erichthonios ; he is welcomed and 
received not by Satyrs and Maenads, his own worshippers and 
kinsfolk, but by his new relations, Athene and Athenian Victor}^ 

The third vase-painting in fig. 128 from a cylix in the Museum 
at Naples^ is a much earlier piece of work. It dates about the 




Fig. 128. 

middle of the sixth century, and is free from any specifically 
Athenian influence. Out of the ground rise two great busts 
inscribed severally Atoyucro? (Dionysos) and Se/xeX?; (Semele). 
Even without the inscriptions there could be no doubt as to 
Dionysos. The vase-painter in his primitive eager fashion makes 
assurance doubly sure. The god holds aloft with pardonable 
pride his characteristic high-handled wine-cup, the kantharos ; 
behind him and Semele a great vine is growing, up one side of 
which a Satyr is clambering. Dionysos is not Liknites here; he 



' Heydemann, Cat. St Angela Coll. 172. Gerhard, Ges. Ahh. Taf. lxviii. The 
authenticity of the inscriptions has been questioned. I examined them recently 
in the Naples Museum and see no ground for suspicion. 



vni] Semele as Keraunia 407 

is in the full bloom of his youth, not elderly though bearded, 
coeval with fair Semele. 

At Thebes the legend of the birth of Dionysos took on a 
special form. He is not only son of Semele, of Earthy but son of 
Semele as Keraunia, Earth the thunder-smitten. 

This aspect of Semele as Keraunia is familiar in classical 
literature. Sophocles- has 'thou and thy mother, she of the 
thunder.' To Euripides^ in the Hippolytns Semele thunder- 
smitten is the stuff of which is made perhaps the most splendid 
poetry he ever wrote : 

' mouth of Dirce, god-built wall 
That Dirce's wells run under ; 
Ye know the Cyprian's fleet foot-f;xll, 
Ye saw the heavens round her flare 
When she lulled to her sleep that Mother fair 
Of Twy-born Bacchus and crowned her there 

The Bride of the bladed thunder: 
For her breath is on all that hath life, and she floats in the air 
Bee-like, death-like, a wonder.' 

And this splendid poetry is based, it seems, not merely on 
mythology but on a local cult, a cult of thunder and a place 
thunder-smitten. The prologue^ of the Bacchae, spoken by 
Dionysos, opens thus, with a description of the sanctuary of 
Semele : 

' Behold god's son is come unto this land 
Of Thebes, even I, Dionysos, whom the brand 
Of heaven's hot splendour lit to life, when she 
Who bore me, Cadmus' daughter Semele, 
Died here. So, changed in shape from god to man, 
I walk again by Dirce's stream, and scan 
Ismenus' shore. There by the castle side 
I see her place, the Tomb of the Lightning's Bride, 
The wreck of smouldering chambers and the great 
Faint wreaths of fire undying, as the hate 
Dies not that Hera held foi- Semele. 

Ay Cadnuis hath done well : in purity 
He keeps this place apart, inviolate 
His daughter's s;inctuary, and I have set 
My green and clustered vines to roV)e it round.' 

Nor again is this merely the effective scenic setting of a play. 

' An inscription of the 5th century B.C. recently discovered shows that at 
Thebes there was an actual sanctuary of Earth. It runs as follows : lapbv Fas 
Mo/caipaj TeXeera^opo. The titles /xaKaipa and Te\€(r(p6pos are applied to Ge in the 
Orphic Hymn (xxvi. 1 and 10). See Hull, de Con: Hell. 1901, p. .^63. 

'' Soph. Ant. 113'J. ■' Eur. Hipi). 555. ^ Eur. Bacch. 1. 



408 Di any SOS [ch. 

Any place that was struck by lightning was regarded as specially 
sacred \ If the place was the tomb of a local heroine there was 
a double sanctity. Such a tomb there unquestionably was at 
Thebes. Pausanias- asserts the fact though he does not state 
that he actually saw the tomb : ' There are also the ruins of the 
house of Lycus and Semele's monument.' Primarily of course 
the sanctity of a thunder-smitten place was more of the nature of 
a taboo than of consecration in oiir sense of the word. It would 
lend itself easily to a legend of judgment on a heroine or of a 
divine Epiphany. The figure of the great Earth-goddess Semele 
faded before the splendour of Zeus. 

Possibly the cult of these thunder-smitten places may serve to 
answer a question asked by Plutarch^ — 'Who among the Boeotians 
are the Psoloeis (Smoky Ones) and who the Aioleiai ? ' Plutarch 
tells a confused story of the daughters of Minyas who went mad 
with desire for human flesh and slew the child of one of them. 
The dreadful deed was commemorated by a 'flight ceremony' that 
formed part of the Agrionia, in which the priest of Dionysos 
pursued with a sword the women of the clan in which the men 
were called Psoloeis and the women Aioleiai, and if he caught 
one, had leave to slay her. Zoilos, a priest in the time of Plutarch, 
actually availed himself of the permission. Bad luck followed. 
Zoilos sickened and died, and the priesthood ceased to be hereditary 
and became elective. The story is very obscure, but Lydus'* in 
discussing thunderbolts says there are two kinds, the one is swift 
and rarefied {fjLav6<i) and fiery and is called apyyjii, the other is 
slow and smoky and is called -v/roXoet?. The family of the Smoky 
Ones may have been worshippers of the smoky kind of thunder- 
bolt. 

Be this as it may, the cult and mythology of Dionysos are 
haunted by reminiscences of lightning and sudden fiery apparitions 
that are probably not merely poetical but primitive. In the 
Bacchae not only is Dionysos fire-born and attended by the light 
of torches, but his Epiphany is marked by a manifest thunder- 

1 Such jDlaces were, if vie may trust the Etymologicon Magnum, called ivrfKvaLa, 
which at least in jDopular etymology was believed to mean 'Places of Advent.' 
They are thus defined : evrfKixna. Xeyfrai eh d Kepavvbs dcr^e^rjKev d Kai dvarideTai 
Au KaTaijidrr] Kai Xeyerai ddvra Kai a^ara. 

2 p. IX. 16. 7. ■' Plut. Q. Gr. xxxviii. 
* Lydus, de mens. iv. 96. 



Yin] Semele as Kermmia 409 

storm, a storm that takes the shape of a resurgence of the flame 
on Semele's tomb. A voice is heard ^: 

' Unveil the Lightning's Eye, arouse 
The tire that sleeps, against this house.' 

And the chorus make answer: 

' Ah saw ye, marked ye there the flame 

From Semele's enhallowed sod 
Awaken'd ? Yea the Death that came 
Ablaze from heaven of old — the same 

Hot splendour of the sliaft of God.' 

And again on Cithaeron- there is not only the mysterious 
voice and the awful silence, but the manifestation of the pillar 

of fire : 

'So spake he and there came 
'Twixt earth and sky a pillar of high flame : 
And silence took the air, and no leaf stirred 
In all the forest dell. Thou hadst not heard 
In that vast silence any wild thing's cry.' 

The Epiphany by fire is of course common to many theologies ; 
we have the Burning Bush and the Pentecostal tongues, but it is 
interesting to find that, in far-away Thrace, the favour of Dionysos 
was made manifest by a great light. The evidence comes from 
Aristotle^ He says: 'There is in the same place (i.e. in Krastonia 
near the district of the Bisaltae) a large and beautiful sanctuary 
of Dionysos, in Avhich it is reported that at the time of the festival 
and the sacrifice, if the god intends to send a good season, a great 
blaze of fire appears, and this is seen by all those whose business 
is in the temenos; but if the god intends a barren season, the light 
does not make its appearance, but there is darkness on the place 
as on other nights.' It would be vain to ask what natural fact, 
whether of summer lightning or burning bush, caused the belief; 
the essential point is the primitive Epiphany by fire, an Epiphany 
not vengeful but beneficent. 

Dionysos is then the son of an ancient Thracian Earth-goddess, 
Semele, and she is Keraunia, thunder-smitten, in some sense the 
bride, it would seem, of our old sky and thunder-god ^ a sort of 
Ouranos later effaced by the splendour of the Hellenic Zeus. If 

1 Eur. Bacch. 594. ^ Eur. Bacch. 1082. 

•' Aristot. Trepl davfi. 122. 

^ See H. Usener, ' Keraunos,' Bhein. Mus. 1905, p. 1, and foi- Zet's ^povrwv 
Kai ' kcTpdiTTuv see Kretschiuer, EinleituiKj in die Geach. d. gr. S2)racliL', p. 241. 



410 Dionysos [ch. 

some such old riature-god existed as is probable in the far back- 
ground of primitive mythology, the affiliation of Zeus and Dionysos 
would be an easy matter. 

In this connection it is interesting to note that not only Zeus 
himself Avas associated with the thunder and the lightning, but 
also the ancient 'Mother of the Gods.' Pindar^ who all through 
the third Pythian has in his mind the sore sickness of Hieron, 
not only bethinks him of Cheiron the primitive Healer but also 
sings : 

' I would pray to the Mother to loose her ban, 
The holy goddess, to whom and to Pan 
Before my gate, all night long, 
The maids do worship with dance and song.' 

The scholiast tells us how it came that Pindar prayed to the 
Mother for healing. One day while Pindar was teaching a pupil 
on a mountain, possibly Cithaeron itself, 'there was heard a great 
noise, and a flame of lightning was seen descending, and Pindar 
saw that a stone image of the Mother had come down at their 
feet, and the oracle ordained that he should set up a shrine to 
the Mother.' The story is transparent — a thunderstorm, lightning 
and a fallen aerolite, the symbol of the Mother, surely of Keraunia. 
And the Mother, the scholiast further tells us, 'had power to 
purify from madness.' She had power to loose as well as to bind. 
In this she was like her son Dionysos. The magical power for 
purification of aerolites and indeed of almost any strange black 
stone is attested by many instances^ Orestes^ was purified at 
Trozen from his madness, mother-sent, by a sacred stone. Most 
curious of all, Porphyry^ tells us that Pythagoras when he was in 
Crete met one of the Idaean Dactyls, worshippers of the Mother, 
and was by him purified with a thunderbolt. 

With a mother thunder-smitten, it was not hard for Dionysos 
to become adopted child of the Hellenic Zeus, God of the 
Thunderbolt. Theologians were ready with the myth of the 
double birth. Semele fell into partial discredit, obscured by 
the splendour of the Father. Matriarchy pales before the new 

1 Pind. Pyth. iii. 77 and schol. ad loc. 

- I have collected and discussed some instances of these in my article 
'Delphika,' J.H.S. xix. 1899, p. 238. 

3 P. VIII. 31. 4, and at Gythium, P. iii. 22. 1. 
^ Porph. Vit. Pijth. xvii. 



vm] 



Dionysos Son of Zeus 



411 



order of patriarchy, and from henceforth the name Dionysos\ 
' son of Zeus,' is supreme. 




DioxYsos Son of Zeus. 

The fatherhood of Zeus is charmingly set forth by the lovely 
little vase-fragment in fig. 129 from 
a red-figured cylix-, found in the ex- 
cavations on the Acropolis and now 
in the IS^ational Museum at Athens. 
Zeus with his sceptre holds the infant 
Dithyramb and displays him proudly 
to the other Olympians. Semele is 
ignored, perhaps half forgotten. Dio- 
nysos in the new order is 'all for the 
father.' 

The all-important question is 
forced upon us — why did Zeus adopt 
him ? Dionysos is the child of the 
Earth-goddess, but why was this par- 
ticular earth-child adopted ? Why did 
his worship spread everywhere with 
irresistible might, overshadowing at 
the end even the cult of his adopted father ? Kore too is 
daughter of Earth, she too in awkward fashion was half affiliated 
to Zeus, yet he never takes her in his arms and her cult though 
wide-spread has no militant missionary aspect. 

Zeus holds the infant Dionysos in his arms, and Dionysos 

1 Dr Kretschmer, [Aus der Anomia, p. 23) has suggested that the second half of 
the name Dionysos (-pvtros) means 'son' or 'j'oung man,' cf. nurus, vv6s, Sk. snughat!, 
O.H.G. schnur. On the fragment of an early black-figured vase signed by Sophilos, 
three nymphs appear with the inscription Nno-at which seems equivalent to Kopat. 
or pv/x(pai. or irapOhoi [A. Mitt. xiv. Taf. i.). Kretschmer's derivation involves not 
only the difficulty as to quantity but also the loss of initial s before n in Thracian. 
Aristophanes seems to have vaguely felt or imagined some connection between the 
last half of the word and Nysa, the birthplace of the god, in his 'Sva-qiov Atos 
AihvvcTov (Ran. 215) echoed by Apollonius llhodius in Atos l^va-qLov via (Arg. iv. 1132). 
Dionysos then is practically either Ai.6(TKovpos, a term of wide application, or possibly 
child of the tribe of Dioi (see p. 371). Dr Kretschmer further points out that the 
fluctuation in inscriptions between i and e (Mdfvffos and ALdwaos) is best accounted 
for by Thracian origin, as the Thracians appear to have had a vowel which was 
not exactly either, and was indifferently rendered in Greek by both. Probably 
then, though not certainly, Dionysos brought his name with him from the North. 
Kretschmer, Einleitmiij, p. 211. 

^ Jahrbuch des Inst. 1891, Taf. i. Sufficient fragments of the vase remain to 
show that the scene represented was the presentation of Dionysos to the Olympians. 



Fig. 129. 



412 Dionysos [ch. 

holds in his the secret of his strength, the vine with its great 
bunch of grapes. But for that bunch of grapes Zeus would never 
have troubled to adopt him. To the popular mind Dionysos w^as 
always Lord of the Vine, as Athene was Lady of the Olive. It is 
by the guerdon of the grape that his Bacchants appeal to Dirce^: 

' By his own joy I vow, 
By the grape upon the bough.' 

It is by his great gift of Wine to sorrowful man that his kingdom 
is established upon earth ^: 

'A god of Heaven is He, 
And born in majesty. 
Yet hath he mirth in the joy of the Earth 
And he loveth constantly 
Her who brings increase, 
The Feeder of children, Peace. 

ISTo grudge hath He of the great. 
No scorn of the mean estate. 
But to all that liveth, his Wine he giveth, 
Griefless, immaculate. 
Only on them that spurn 
Joy may his anger burn.' 

It is the usual mythological inversion, he of the earth is trans- 
lated to heaven that thence he may descend. 

Dionysos as god of the grape is so familiar that the idea needs 
no emphasis. It is more important to note that the vine as the 
origin of his worship presents certain difficulties. 

It has clearly been seen that Dionysos was a Northerner, a 
Thracian. Wine is not the characteristic drink of the North. Is 
it likely that wine, a drink characteristic to this day of the South, 
is the primitive essence of the w^orship of a god coming into 
Greece from the North ? 

The answer to this difficulty is an interesting one. The main 
distinguishing factor of the religion of Dionysos is always the cult 
of an intoxicant, but wine is not the only intoxicant, nor in the 
North the most primitive. Evidence is not wanting that the 
cult of the vine-god was superimposed on, affiliated to, in part 
developed out of, a cult that had for its essence the worship of 
an early and northern intoxicant, cereal not vinous. 

To this conclusion I have been led by the consideration of the 
cultus titles of the god. 

1 Eur. Bacch. 535. - Eur. Bacch. 416. 



vni] B rondos 413 

Bromios. Braites. Sabazios. 

Dionysos is a god of many names ; he is Bacchos, Baecheus, 
lacchos, Bassareus, Bromios, Euios, Sabazios, Zagreus, Thyoueus, 
Lenaios, Eleuthereus, and the list by no means exhausts his titles. 
A large number of these names are like Lenaios, 'He of the Wine- 
Press,' only descriptive titles ; they never crystallize to the dignity 
of proper names. Some, like lacchos and probably Bacchos itself, 
though they ultimately became proper names, were originally only 
cries. lacchos was a song even down to the time of Aristophanes \ 
and was probably, to begin with, a ritual shout or cry kept up long 
after its meaning was forgotten. Such cries from their vagueness, 
their aptness for repetition, are peculiarly exciting to the religious 
emotions. How many people attach any precise significance to 
the thrice repeated, stately and moving words that form the 
prooemium to our own Easter Hymn ? 

'Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.' 

They are a homage beyond articulate speech. Then, as now, 
these excited cries became sacred titles of the worshippers who 
used them: 'Evian women' (evcoi yvvaiKe<i) were the ancient and 
more reverent counterpart of our 'Hallelujah lasses.' 

The various titles of the god are of course of considerable use 
in determining his nature, for they all express some phase of 
emotion in the worshipper, and it is of these phases that a god is 
compounded. Certain names seem to cling to certain places. 
Sabazios is Thracian and Phrygian, Zagreus Cretan, Bromios 
largely Theban, lacchos Athenian. Some of the epithets have 
unquestionably shifted their meaning in the course of time. The 
Greeks were adepts at false etymology, and an excellent instance 
of this is a title of the first importance for our argument, 
Bromios. 

The title Bromios has to our modern ears a poetical, some- 
what mystical ring-. It never occurs in Homer, nor in Sophocles. 
Pindar and Aeschylus both use it, Euripides often. The poets, 
by their usage, clearly show that they connect the title Avith the 

1 Ar. Ran. 331. 

2 Preller (3rd ed. p. 6(55) goes so far as to say 'lip6/j.ios scheint nur poetisches 
Beiwort zu sein.' 



414 Bionysos [ch. 

verb ^pe/ubo), which means 'to make a confused sound.' Pindar in 
a dithyrambic fragment^ says: 

'We hymn thee Bromios and Him of the loud cry.' 

The address it may be noted is to the Cadmean Dionysos. 

Sometimes the association is definitely with thunder {jSpovrrj). 
Thus in the second Olympian" we have : 

' High in Olympus lives for evermore 
She of the delicate hair, 
Semele fair, 
Who died by the thunder's roar.' 

Here the title Bromios can scarcely have been remote from 
Pindar's mind, though he does not care to press the allusion. 
In the Bacchae there seems no consciousness of etymology. The 
titles Dionysos and Bromios come haphazard, but throughout the 
play Dionysos is in some degree a god of thunder as well as 
thunder-born, a god of mysterious voices, of strange, confused, 
orgiastic music, music which we know he brought with him from 
the North. 

Strabo^ has preserved for us two fragments from the lost 
Edonians of Aeschylus which deal with this music of orgy and 
madness. Aeschylus, he says, speaks in the Edonians of the 
goddess Kotys and the instruments of her worship, and imme- 
diately introduces the worshippers of Dionysos, thus : 

' One on the fair-turned pipe fulfils 
His song, with the warble of fingered trills 
The soul to frenzy awakening. 
From another the brazen cymbals ring. 
The shawm blares out, but beneath is the moan 
Of the bull-voiced mimes, unseen, unknown, 
And in deep diapason the shuddering sound 
Of drums, like thunder, beneath the ground.' 

Of the 'bull-voiced mimes' we should have been glad to know 
more details, but the fragment, obscure as it is, leaves at least 
the impression of weird exciting ceremonial, and most of all of 
mysterious music. 

All this must have helped to make of Bromios the god of 

1 Find. frg. 45 

Tov Bpdfj.iov Tov "EpijSdav re Ka\4ofJi.ev. 

2 Find. 01. II. 27 

fuiet iJ.^v (V 'OXvfnrioii airodavovaa. Pp6fJ.(j} 
Kepawov ravvideipa "^e/neXa. 

3 Strabo x. p. 470. 



viii] Diont/sos as Bromios 415 

sounds and voices; yet it is probable, indeed almost certain, that 
the title had another origin, simpler, less poetical. We owe the 
clue to this primitive meaning to the Emperor Julian. 

Julian in his northern campaign saw and no doubt tasted with 
compunction a wine, made not from the grape but from barley. 
After the fashion of his age he wrote an epigram^ to this new, or 
rather very old, Dionysos. From the number of instructive puns it 
contains this epigram is almost untranslateable, but as its evidence 
is for our purpose of paramount importance it may be roughly 
Englished as follows : 

To wine i)iade of barley-. 

' Who and whence art thou, Dionyse ? Now, by the Bacchus true 
"Whom well I know, the son of Zeus, say — "Who and what are you?" 
He smells of nectar like a god, you smack of goats and spelt, 
For lack of grapes from ears of grain your countryman the Celt 
Made you. Your name's Demetrios, but never Dionyse, 
Bromos, Oat-born, not Bromios, Fire-born from out the skies.' 

The emperor makes three very fair puns, as follows: ^po/Ma 
oats, l3p6/j,Lo<i of the thunder; Trupoyevr] wheat-born, irvpL'yevri fire- 
born ; Tpd'yo<; goat and Tpdya an inferior kind of wheat, spelt. 

1 Anthol. Pal. ix. 368 

EiS olvOV (XTTO Kpidrji. 

Tis irddev eh Aibvvae; /xa, yap rov aX-qdia ^clkxov 

ov cr' eirfyLyvwcKW t6v Alos ol8a fidvov. 
Ketvos viKTap 6oco5e, av de rpdyov ' tj pa. ere KeXroi 

TTj Treuiri ^orpvwv Tev^av (xtt' aaraxi"^''. 
Ti^ ce XPV KoXefiv Aij/xriTpiov, ov A(.6i'Vffoi', 

irvpoyevrj /jLaWov Kai (ipSfiov ov Bpdfxiov. 
The epigram is discussed and the play on wvpiyevTi, wvpoyevT], ^pbfios and Bpo^tio? 
rightly observed by Helm (Kulturpflanzen, 6th ed. p. 147), and to his book and 
Schrader's Reallexicon I am indebted for many references. Hehu misses the 
point of rpayoi but it was noted long ago by Couring in the Thesaurus of Stephanos 
(2342 b) s.v. rpdyos. He remarks apropos of the epigram : ' non hircum sed ex 
olyra et tritico confectum panem.' See also Dr W. Headlam, CI. Rev. 1901, p. 23. 
- Mr Francis Darwin kindly tells me that rpdyov is said to be a kind of wheat 
known now as triticum aDiylaeum. It is akin to spelt, triticum spelta, the ancient 
j'eta. ^p6fj.os is some form of oats, in modern Greek ^pw/nr]. It is of interest to note 
that in the 4th century b.c. ^po/xos was an important cereal accounted as more 
wholesome than barley. This is clear from the words of the physician Dieuches : 
ylverai 0^ &\(piTov Kai dirb rov ^pbfxov. (ppvyerai de aw t(^ dxvpif> Trdv. dwoTrrjcraeTai 
T€ Kai Tpt/3erat Kai epvKeraL KaOdwep Kai t6 Kpldivov dXcpirov. tovto rd d\<j>iTov KpeiTTov 
Kai d(f>v(Td}Tep6v ecm toD Kpidivov [xxi. veter. et clar. medic. Grace, var. opusc. ed. 
F. de Matthaei, Mosquae 1808, p. 39; see Hehn, Kulturpfi. 7th ed. p. 553). By 
the time of Galen it seems to have fallen into comparative disuse, displaced pro- 
bably l;y the richer cereals. He says {de aliment, farult. i. 14) : Tpo(py) 5' eortc 
viro^vyiuii> ovk dydpwirwv, el /mtj wore dpa Xi/jLuiTTOvTes eaxdrics dvayKaadelev, (k tovtov 
ToO (Tn^pixaTos. The modern history of oats presents a close analogy. Displaced 
in the south by the richer wheat it remains the staple food of the northern Scot, 
and is the food of cattle only in the south. 



416 Dionysos [ch. 

The gist of the third pun will be considered more fully at a later 
stage of the argument. For the present it is sufficient to note 
that all three have the same substantial content, there is a 
Dionysos who is not of heaven but of earth. Julian propounds 
as an elegant jest the simple but illuminating mythological truth 
that the title Bromios points to a god born not of the lightning 
and thunder but of an intoxicant made from the cereal /3p6fxo<;. 
Bromios is Demetrios, son of Demeter the Corn-Mother, before 
he becomes god of the grape and son by adoption of Olympian 
Zeus. 

Julian is not precise in his discrimination between the various 
edible grasses. His epigram is headed, ' To wine made of barley 
{Kpi6r]<i) ' ; the god, he says, smacks of spelt (Tpayo<;), he is luheat- 
born {irvpo'yevrj) and he is of oats {^pofjbos:). It matters to Julian 
nothing, nor is it to our argument of first importance, of what 
particular cereal this new-old Dionysos is made. The point is 
that it is of some cereal, not of the grape. The god is thus seen 
to be son of Semele, Earth-goddess in her agricultural aspect as 
Demeter, Corn-Mother. We shall later (p. 517) see that he was 
worshipped with service of the winnowing-fan, and we shall 
further see that, when he-of-the-cereal-intoxicant became he-of- 
the-\vine-of-grapes, the instrument that had been a winnowing-fan 
became a grape-basket. 

The possibility of this simple origin of Bromios grows when 
we consider another epithet of the god. In the Paean to Dionysos 
recently discovered at Delphi^ there occurs the title hitherto 
unexplained — Braites. The hymn opens thus with a string of 
cultus epithets : 

'Come, O Dithyrambos, Bacchos, come, 
Euios, Thyrsos-Lord, Braites, come, 

Bromios, come, and coming with thee bring 
Holy hoiu's of thine own holy spring.' 

Nowhere else does the title Braites occur; but the hymn, as 

1 H. Weil, Bull, de Con: Hell. xix. p. 401 

[Aevp' dva A]t^ypa/U/3e, Bd/cx > 

([ffie dvparflpes, Upa'i- 
TOL, B/56/xt(e), T}pLva[h Ikov 
TaLcr5(e)] iepah ev cJpats. 
Dr Weil suggests 'faut-il le rattacher a ppa.'iu} = pa.iu et I'expliquer "celui qui frappe 
et qui brise"?' 



viii] Diomjsos as Sahazios 417 

an actual ritual composition, inscribed and set up at Delphi, is an 
important source. Braites has been explained as the Breaker or 
Sti-iker, but this is scarcely a happy epithet for the Spring-god. 
In the light of Bromios it may be suggested that the epithet is 
connected with the late Latin word hraisum, which means ' grain 
prepared for the making of the beer braisumK' Braites would then 
like Bromios be an epithet derived from a cereal iutoxicant. 

An examination of the title Sabazios leads to results more 
certain and satisfactory. The name Sabazios has a more foreign 
sound than Dionysos, even than Bromios. Sabazios was never 
admitted even to the outskirts of Olympus. In the time of 
Demosthenes'^ his rites were regarded by the orthodox as foreign, 
outrageous, disreputable. One of the counts in the unmannerly 
attack of Demosthenes on Aeschines is that Aeschines had been 
instructed by his mother in mysteries and rites that were certainly 
those of Sabazios, that having performed various degrading cere- 
monials he ' led those admirable thiasoi about the streets, they 
being crowned with fennel and poplar, and gesticulated with great 
red snakes, waving them over his head and shouting Euoi Saboi.' 
The Saboi Avere the worshippers of Sabazios as the Bacchae of 
Bacchos. Of course Demosthenes is grossly unjust. The cere- 
monies of Sabazios could be closely paralleled by the perfectly 
orthodox ritual of Dionysos, but they passed under another name, 
were not completely canonical, and above all things were still 
realized as foreign. That pious men of good repute might quietly 
worship Sabazios is clear from the account of the ' Superstitious 
Man' in Theophrastos^. Against his moral character nothing can 
be urged, but that he was a little over-zealous, and ' whenever he 
chanced to see a red snake he would invoke Sabazios.' 

Down to Christian days the snake was an important feature in 
the cult of Sabazios. Clement and Arnobius'^ both state that 
one of the ' tokens ' of the mysteries of Sabazios was ' the god 
(gliding) through the bosom.' The snake was of course associated 

' Ducange s.v. braisum : grana ad conliciendam braisum cerevisiam praeparata. 

- Dem. de Cor. 313. 

•'■ Theoplir. Char, lxxvii. 

* Clem. Al. Protr. ii. Arnob. c. gent. v. p. 170. For the curious votive bands 
twined round by snakes sec Blinkenberg, 'Darstellungen d. Sabazios und Denknialer 
seines Kultes' in his ArchdologUche Stuclien, pp. C6 — 128, Taf. u. and iii. 



II. 



27 



418 Dionysos [ch. 

also with Dionysos — he may have inherited it from the earlier 
god — but his more characteristic vehicle was the bull. Sabazios 
seems always to have been regarded as more primitive and savage 
than Dionj^sos. Diodorus\ puzzled by the many forms of Dionysos, 
says : ' Some people fable that there was another Dionysos very 
much earlier in date than this one, for they allege that there was 
a Dionysos born of Zeus and Persephone, the one called by some 
Sabazios, whose birth and sacrifices and rites they instance as 
celebrated by night and in secret on account of shameless cere- 
monies attending them.' These last words probably refer to the 
mystic marriage of the god with the initiated (p. 534). 

The symbolism of the snake has already (p. 825) been discussed. 
A god whose vehicle was the snake would find easy affiliation in 
Greece, where every dead hero was a snake. 

Sabazios is left unsung by tragic poets, but the realism of 
comedy reflects the popular craze for semi-barbarian worship. 
The temper of Demosthenes was not, if Strabo^ be right, character- 
istically Athenian. ' As in other matters,' Strabo says, ' the 
Athenians were always hospitable to foreign customs, so with 
the gods. They adopted many sacred customs from abroad and 
Avere ridiculed in comedies for doing so, and this especially as 
regards Phrygian and Thracian rites. Plato mentions the 
Bendidean, and Demosthenes the Phrygian, rites in his accusation 
against Aeschines and his mother on the count that Aeschines 
joined his mother in her rites and went about in a thiasos and 
cried aloud Euoi Saboi and Hyes Attes, for these cries are of 
Sabazios and the Mother.' 

It is then to comedy, to Aristophanes, that we owe most of our 

references to Sabazios, hints of his real character and his inner 

kinship with Dionysos. In an untranslateable pun in the Birds^ 

he tells us that Sabazios is a Phrygian, and from the Lysistrata* 

we learn that his worship was orgiastic and much affected by 

women. The ' deputation man ' exclaims : 

' Has the wantonness of women then blazed up, 
Their tabourings, Sabazios all about, 
Their clamour for Adonis on the roofs?' 

1 Died. IV. 4. 2 sti-ab. x. 3 § 471. 

3 Ar. Av. 875 

KoX (f>pvyi\(p Saj8a('(aj Kal arpovdf /xeydXr] 

firiTpi deuv Kai avdpiSiirwv. 
•1 Ar. Lijs. 388. 



viii] Dionysos as Sahazios 419 

But most instructive of all is the mention of Sabazios in the 
opening of the Wasps^. The two slaves Sosias and Xanthias are 
watching over their master Bdelycleon. They know he is a 
dangerous monster and they ought to keep awake. 

' Xan. I know, but 1 do want a little peace. 

Sos. "Well, chance it then. Some sweet and drowsy thing 
Is falling drop by drop upon my eyes. 

Xan. What I Are you clean mad or a Korybant ? 

Sos. Xo, 'a sleep holds me from Sabazios. 

Xan. And I too herd the same Sabazios. 

Just now a very ]\Iede of a nodding sleep 
Came down and made an onset on my eyes.' 

Sabazios is here clearly not so much the god of ecstasy and 
orgy as of compelling irresistible sleep. And why ? A late 
historian gives the simple answer. 

Ammianus Marcellinus" tells us that, when the Emperor Valens 
was besieging Chalcedon, the besieged by way of insult shouted to 
him ' Sabaiarius.' He adds in explanation ' sabaia is a drink of 
the poor in Illyria made of bailey or corn turned into a liquor.' 
' Sabaiarius ' is then ' Beer-man,' beer-drinker or brewer. S. Jerome, 
himself a Dalmatian, says in his commentary on Isaiah^ that 
' there is a sort of drink made from grain and water, and in 
the provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia it is called, in the local 
barbarian speech, sabaium.' To the wine-drinker the beer-drinker 
seemed a low fellow. Wine was in itself a rarer, finer beverage, 
probably at first more expensive. Even to-day in some parts of 
beer-drinking Germany to drink beer at the solemn midday dinner 
is almost a vulgarity. Sabazios, god of the cheap cereal drink, 
brings rather sleep than inspiration. 

The testimony of Sabazios is now added to that of Bromios 
and Braites. Separately the conjectured etymology of each epithet 
might fall far short of conviction, but the cumulative force of the 
three together offers evidence that seems conclusive. 

' Ar. Vesj). 5 — 12. The word ^ovKoXeis (v. 6) points to the ^ovK6\ot, priests or 
attendants of the buU-Dionysos. 

■■^ Ammian. Marcell. 2G. 8. 2 : est autem sabaia ex ordeo vel frumento in liquorera 
conversis paupertinus in Illyrico i)otus. 0. Schrader, Realle.vikon, p. 89, points out 
that the derivation of Sabazios from sabaia is possible, if the view of Krctschmer 
(Kinleitung, p. 195) be accepted tliat Sabazios represents an earlier Savadios; he 
compares the old Gallic divinity liraciaca 'God of Malt.' Mr A. B. Cook kindly 
drew my attention to the remark of De Vit in his edition of Forcellini's Lexicon, 
s.v. sabaia: 'unde etiam zabaion vulf,'o apud nostrates' (Venetos?). 

•' Hieron. Com. 7 in Is. cap. 19 : <piod genus est potionis ex fru^ibus aquaque 
confectum et vulgo in Dalmatiae Pannoniacque provinciis gentili barbaroque sormone 
appellatur sabaitun. 

27—2 



420 Dioiij/sos [CH. 

A fourth link in the chain still remains. The emperor Julian's 
third pun rpdyof;, goat, and Tpdyo<;, spelt, has yet to be con- 
sidered : 

^ He smells of nectar like a god, you smack of goats and spelt.' 

The word rpdyoq is usually rendered ' goat,' and the meaning 
' spelt ' ignored. There is of course a reference to the time- 
honoured jest about the animal, but that the primary reference 
is to grain, not the goat, is clear from the words that immediately 
follow : 

'For lack of grapes from ears of grain your countryman the Celt 
Made you.' 

In translating I have therefore used both the meanings ; the 
formal pun is untranslateable. 

It is an odd fact that the ancients seem to have called certain 
tvild forms of fruits and cereals by names connecting them with 
the goat\ The reason is not clear, but the fact is well-established. 
The Latins called the wild fig caprificus ; Pausanias expressly tells 
us that the Messenians gave to the wild fig-tree the name Tpdyo<;, 
goat. Vines, when they ran wild to foliage rather than fruit, were 
said rpajdv. I would conjecture that the inferior sort of spelt 
called Tpdyo<;, goat, owes its name to this unexplained linguistic 
habit. It is even possible that the beard with which spelt is 
furnished may have helped out the confusion. Tragedy I believe 
to be not the ' goat-song,' but the ' harvest-song ' of the cereal 
Tpdjo<i, the form of spelt known as ' the goat.' When the god of 
the cereal, Bromios-Braites-Sabazios, became the god of the vine, 
the fusion and confusion of rpaycoBla, the spelt-song, with rpvyco- 
hia, the song of the winelees^ was easy and indeed inevitable. 
The Tpaywhoi, the 'beanfeast-singers,' became rpvywhol or ' must- 
singers.' 

The difficulties in the way of the canonical etymology of tragedy 
are acknowledged to be greats In discussing the Satyrs it has 

1 This was first observed by Grimm (Geschichte d. d. Sprache, p. 66), see Hehn, 
Kulturpflanzen, 7tb edit. p. -loO, but Hehn's explanation of the custom does not 
seem satisfactory. Our custom of calHng inferior varieties of plants by dog-names, 
e.g. Dog-Rose, l)og-Violet, seems analogous. 

- For the group of words denoting 'dregs' e.g. O.P. dragios, with which 
Tpvytpoia is connected, see Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities, p. 322, and Hehn, 
Kulturpflanzen, p. 159. 

•* For the literature of this protracted controversy see U. v. Wilamowitz, Eur. 
Her. I. p. 32 ; A. Korte, Jalirhuch d. Inst. 1893, viii. p. 61 : Loschke, A. Mitt. xv. 



ym] Tragedy the Goat-song 421 

already been shown that the primitive followers of Dionysos are 
mythologically conceived of not as goat-mew, but as horse-mew. 
The primitive '^roa^song,' we are asked to believe, was sung by 
a chorus of horse-mew. The case in fact stands thus. We are 
confi-onted on the one hand by the undoubted fact that on 
countless vase-paintings of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. the 
attendants of Dionysos are horse-w\ew, while goat-w\ew attend the 
Earth-goddess (p. 277); on the other hand we have the supposed 
fact that tragedy is the ^oa^song. But this supposed fact is 
merely an etymological assumption. If another etymology be 
found for tragedy, the whole discrepancy disappears. Such au 
etymology is, I think, offered by Tpdyo<i ' spelt,' with the further 
advantage that it contains in itself a hint of how the goat mis- 
understanding arose. 

A fragment of Aeschylus cited, but I think erroneously, as 
evidence of a goat chorus remains to be examined. In a lost 
traged}'^ a Satyr on the stage sees for the first time fire just given 
to mortals, and he runs to kiss her as though she were a beautiful 
maiden. Prometheus warns him : if you do this 
' You'll be a goat mourning his beard.' 

The passage is used as evidence for the goat form and dress of 
the Satyric chorus. Surely such an inference is needless; the 
point of the jest is the morals and manners of the Satyr. To 
reconstruct a goat-chorus out of a casual joke is labour in vain. 

We have then found four several titles, Bromios, Braites, 
Sabazios and tragedy, for which the supposition of a cereal drink 
affords a simple, satisfactory explanation. It remains to show that, 
though the words hromos, braisum, sabaia and tragos have become 
to us dim and almost forgotten in the lapse of time, a cereal drink 
such as they imply was widely in use in ancient days, and that 
among Northern nations. 

The history of fermented drink in Europe seems to have been 

1894, p. 518; K. Wernicke, Hermes 1897, p. 290; Bethe, ProU'i). p. 48. My own 
view was first suggested in the Classical Rev. July 1902, p. 331. 

1 Aesch. frg. 190 ap. Plut. Mor. p. 86 toO di aaTvpov rb vvp d)s irpwrov ui(j>dr) 
^ouXo/JL^vov <pi\i}<rai Kal wepiXa^elv 6 UpoM^^^^ 

Tpdyos -yivei-ov apa Trevdrja-fii crvye. 



422 Dionysos [ch. 

briefly this. Never, so far back as we can look into mythology, was 
miserable man without some rudimentary means of intoxication. 
Before he had advanced to agriculture he had a drink made of 
naturally fermented honey, the drink we now know as mead, 
which the Greeks called fieOv or ^iOr]. The epithet ' sweet ' which 
they constantly apply to wine surprises us, but as a characteristic 
of ' mead ' it is natural enough. This mead made of honey 
appears in ancient legends. When Zeus would intoxicate Kronos 
he gave him not wine, Porphyry^ says, for wine was not, but a 
honey-drink to darken his senses. Night says to Zeus : 

' When prostrate 'neath the lofty oaks you see him 
Lie drunken with the work of murmuring bees, 
Then bind him,' 

and again Plato- tells how when Poros falls asleep in the garden 
of Zeus he is drunk not with wine but with nectar, for wine was 
not yet. Nectar, the ancient drink of the gods, is mead made of 
honey ; and men know this, for they otfer to the primitive earth-god 
libations of honey {fxekia-irovha). The gods like their worshippers 
knew the joys of intoxication before the coming of the grape- 
Dionysos. Plutarch^ says mead {[xeOv) was used as a libation 
before the appearance of the vine, and ' even now those of the bar- 
barians who do not drink wine drink honey-drink ' (/j,e\i,Teiov). 
The nephalia are but intoxicants more primitive than wine. 

Next in order came the drinks made of cereals fermented, 
the various forms of beer and crude malt spirit. These gave to 
the Thracian Dionysos his names Bromios, Braites, Sabazios, but 
they never seem to have found a real home in Greece. Mention 
of them occurs in classical writers, but they are always named as 
barbarian curiosities, as drinks in use in Thrace, Armenia, Egypt, 
but never like mead even in primitive times the national drink of 
Hellas, Isis in Egypt is addressed as not only Our Lady of Bread 
but also Our Lady of Beer*, but Bromios when he comes to Greece 
forgets the oats from which he sprang. 

The first beer was probably a very rude product, like the drink 
mentioned by Xenophon^ as still in use among the Armenians of 
his day ; the grain was pounded and allowed to ferment with the 

1 Porph. de antr. nymph. 7. " Plat. Sijmp. p. 203. 

■* Plut. Symp. IV. 6. 

* Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie d. alten Egypter, p. 647. 
" Xen. Aiiab. iv. 5. 26 evrjaav Oe Kal avrai al Kpidal iVoxe'^f's- 



vni] Cereal Intoxicants 423 

gi'ains still floating about in the drinking-cups. The Lithuanians 
in the Middle Ages are said to have made their beer over-night 
and drunk it next morning \ Beer of this primitive kind was best 
sucked up through a pipe. Archilochus" alludes to the practice. 

The name given to the drink, jSpvrov, means simply some- 
thing brewed or fermented, xleschylus-' in his Lykurgos makes 
some one, probably Lykurgos the Thracian, drink /Spurov. 

Athenaeus, in the passage in which he quotes Archilochus, 
cites quite a number of authorities about the making of these 
rude cereal drinks. According to Hellanicus in his Origins, hruton 
could be made also of roots. ' Some people,' he says, ' drink 
hruton made of roots as the Thracian drink is made of barley.' 
Hecataeus in his Journey round Europe notes that the Paeonians 
drank hruton made from barley and an admixture of millet and 
endive. 

Another name for this drink made from grain was zythos. 
Diodorus* draws a lamentable picture of the straits to which the 
peoples of Gaul were put because ' from the excessive cold and 
intemperate character of the climate, the land could not bring 
forth either wine or oil. Bereft of these products the Gauls make 
of barley the drink that is called zythos; they likewise wash out 
their honeycombs with water and use the rinsings. They had 
only imported wine, but to this they were excessively addicted 
{kcitolvoi), they drank it intemperately and either fell asleep dead 
drunk or became stark mad.' Here we have the living historical 
prototype of the Centaurs, the uncivilized men who cannot 
support the taste of wine, the lamentable story of imported in- 
toxicants told in all ages all the world over. 

The number of primitive beers — cervisia, korma, sahaia, zythos 

^ Lasicius, De Diis Sdrmaciitarnm, p. 44. 

- Archil, frg. ap. Athen. x. 67 § 447. Bergk 32 

uiinrep Trap' av\(f §pvTov ij Qpiji^ avrjp 
t) 4>pi>| i^pv^e. 
^ Nauck, Aesch. frg. 124 

KOLK Tuivb' iiTLve ^pvrov icrxvaiviov XP^^V 
Kai aefivoKOTTTei tovt' iv dvdpeia areyrj. 
It is clear that someone drank something called jSpvTou but beyond that the meaning 
is obscure and >i'auck throws no light. In my first edition I translated the passage 
wrongly. 

In connection with ppvTov Prof. Bury kindlj' draws my attention to the very 
interesting statement of Suidas, ^povrides, ywalKes ovtu KaXov/xevai, oiovd Zi^vWai 
Kal Trpo^TjTtSey. These ^povrides were clearly inspired Maenads. 
■* Diod. V. 26. 



424 Dionysos [CH. 

— is countless and it would be unprofitable to discuss them in 
detail. All have this in common, and it is sufficient for our 
purpose, that they are spirituous drinks made of fermented grain, 
they appear with the introduction of agriculture, they tend to 
supersede mead, and are in turn superseded by wine. To put it 
mythologically the worship of Bromios, Braites and Sabazios pales 
before the Epiphany of Dionysos. Sabazios is almost wholly left 
behind, a foreigner never naturalized ^ Bromios is transformed 
beyond recognition ; to the old name is given a new meaning, a 
new etjanology. 

It is important to note that had there been only Sabazios, had 
Bromios never emerged from himself, both would probably have 
remained in Thracian obscurity. The Thracians never conquered 
Greece ; there was, therefore, no historical reason why their god 
should impose himself. His dominance is unquestionably due to 
the introduction and rapid spread of the vine. Popular tradition 
enshrined as it usually does a real truth — the characteristic gift 
{')(^dpi<i) of Dionysos by which he won all hearts was wine, wine 
made not of barley but of tlie juice of the grape. A new, in- 
coming plant attaches itself to the local divinity, whoever and 
whatever he be. The olive attached itself to Athene who was 
there before its coming, and by the olive the prestige of Athene 
was sensibly increased ; but the olive, great glory though it was 
and though a Sophocles sang its praises, had never the divine 
omnipotence of the vine. Olive oil over all the countries of 
Southern Europe supplanted the other primitive grease, butter-. 
Butter is hard to keep fresh in hot countries, as every traveller 
finds to his cost in Italy and Greece to-day. But the supersession 
of butter by oil was a quiet, unnoticed advance, not a triumphant 
progress like the Coming of the Vine. 

We are now at last in a position to say what was the characteristic 
essence of the worship of Diom^sos. The fact however repugnant 

1 In the north as to-day tlie Beer-god retained his supremacy. It is interesting 
to note that the British saint, St Brigida, re-performed the miracle of Caua with 
the characteristically northern modification that she turned the water into excellent 
beer: Christl autem ancilln videns quia tunc illico non poterat invenire cerevisiam, 
aquam ad balneum portatam henedixerit et in optimam cerevisiam conversa est a 
Deo et ahundanter sitientihus propinata est. Acta SS. Febr. i. Vita iv. S. Brigidae 
cap. IV. quoted by Hehn, op. cit. p. 149. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead 
(Chap, ex.) the desire of the soul is for cakes and ale. 

2 Hehn, Kulturpjianzen, 7th edit. p. 154. 



A^m] Dioni/sos as Dendrites 425 

must be fairly faced. This essence was intoxication. But by the 
very nature of primitive thought this essence was ahiiost instantly 
transformed into something more, something deeper and higher 
than mere physical intoxication. It was intoxication thought of 
as possession. The savage tastes of some intoxicant for the first 
time, a great delight takes him, he feels literally a new strange 
life within him. How has it come about ? The answer to him is 
simple. He is possessed by a god {evOeo^), not figuratively but 
literally and actually; there is a divine thing within him that is 
more than himself, he is mad, but with a divine madness. All 
intense sorrow or joy is to him obsession, possession. When in 
the Hippolytus^ the chorus see Phaedra distraught with passion, 
instinctively they ask: 

' Is this some spirit, child of man, 
Doth Hecate hold thee perchance or Pan, 
Doth She of the Mountains work her ban 
Or the dread Corybantes bind thee ? ' 

They utter not poetical imagery but a real belief 

To what beautiful imaginations, to what high spiritual vision 
this Bacchic cult of intoxication led will best be considered when 
we come to speak of Orpheus. For the present some other 
primitive elements in Dionysiac worship remain to be considered, 
elements essential to the understanding of his cult. 



DlONYSOS THE TrEE-GoD (DENDRITES). 

Intoxication is of the essence of the god Dionysos, it is the 
element that marks him out from other gods, it is the secret of 
his missionary impulse; but to suppose that it exhausts his content 
would be a grave misunderstanding. There go to his making not 
only this distinctive element of intoxication but certain other 
primitive factors common to the gods of other peoples. 

Thinking people even in antiquity, when the study of com- 
parative mythology scarcely existed, were struck by analogies 
between Dionysos and other divinities. Plutarch, who thought 
much, if somewhat vaguely, on religious matters, was very sensible 
of this. In the enlightened and instructive parallel that he 

' Eur. Hipp. 141. 



426 Dionysos [ch. 

draws 1 between Osiris and Dionysos, he sees that Dionysos like 
the gods of many other peoples is a god who in some sense 
embodies the life of nature that comes and goes with the seasons, 
dies and rises again with the fruits of the earth. In a passage 
full of insight he draws attention to the analogies of the diverse 
cults he had observed. 'The Phrygians think that the god is 
asleep in the winter, and is awake in summer, and at the one 
season they celebrate with Bacchic rites his goings to bed and at 
the other his risings up. And the Paphlagonians allege that in 
the winter he is bound down and imprisoned and in the spring he 
is stirred up and let loose.' The passage and others that will 
later be quoted are as it were a forecast of the whole comparative 
method. 

The truth that Dionysos, like many another god, was a god of 
the impulse of life in nature was not only apprehended by the 
philosopher, it was also evidenced in cultus. This is seen very 
clearly in two popular phases of the worship of Dionysos, his 
worship as a tree-god and his worship as a hull. 

The vine is a tree ; but Dionysos is Dendrites, Tree-god, and 
a plant-god in a far wider sense. He is god of the fig-tree, 
Sykites ; he is Kissos, god of the ivy ; he is Anthios, god of 
all blossoming things ; he is Phytalmios, god of growth. In this 
respect he differs scarcely at all from certain aspects of Poseidon, 
or from the young male god of Attica and the Peloponnese, 
Hermes. Probably this aspect of the god, at once milder and 
wider, was always acceptable in Southern Greece and made his 
affiliation with the indigenous Hermes an easy matter. This 
affiliation is clearly shown by the fact that in art Hermes and 
Dionysos appear, as they were worshipped in cultus, as hernis ; 
the symbol of both as gods of fei'tility is naturally the phallos. 
The young Dionysos, a maturer Liknites, is not distinguishable 
from Hermes. 

On the beautiful cylix by Hieron^ reproduced in fig. 130, 
perhaps the most exquisite thing that ancient ceramography has 

1 Plut. de Is. et Osir. lxix. ^pvyes 8^ tov deov olb^ievoi xf'M<JJ''os Kadevdeiv, d^povs 
d' iypriyopivai, rbre fjiev KaTevvacrfj-ovs, Tore 8' dveyepaei.s ^aKx^iovres aiiTt^ reXovai. 
UacpXayovts 8e KaraSeTadai Kal KaOe'ipywadai x^i-f^^vos, ripos Se Kive^crdai Kal dvaXveadai 
(pdcTKovcn. The earlier portion of this passage deals with the analogous cult of 
Demeter (p. 128) already discussed. 

- Berlin, Cat. 2290. JViener Vorlegebldtter, Serie A, Taf. vi. 



vni] 



Dionysos as Dendrites 



427 



left us, this affiliation is clearly shown. In the centre design 
Dionysos is all vine-god. He holds a great vine-branch in his left 
hand, in his right his own sceptre the thyrsos; his worshipper is 
a horse-Satyr piping on the double flutes. But on the exterior of 




Fig. 130. 



the cup, a scene of cultus rather than mythology, he is of wider 
import, he is Dendrites. The god round whom the lovely Maenads 
dance in circle is a rude pillar or plank draped with a splendid 
ritual garment. It is a primitive herm decorated with great 



428 



Dioiiysos 



[CH. 



bunches of grapes, but also with ivy sprigs and honeycombs and 
a necklace of dried figs, such as the Greek peasant now-a-days 
takes with him for food on a journey. He is god of all grow- 
ing things, of every tree and plant and natural product, and only 
later exclusively of the vine. He takes to himself ivy and pine 
and honeycomb. The honey-drink he supersedes, yet honey is 
sacred to him. Only the olive he never takes, for Athene had it 
already. Ivy especially was sacred to him ; his Maenads chewed 
ivy leaves^ for inspiration, as the Delphic prophetess chewed the 
bay. Pliny- says: 'Even to this day ivy is used to decorate the 
thyrsos of the god and the helmets and shields used by the peoples 
of Thrace in their rites,' and this ritual ivy is remembered by 
Dionysos when he comes to Thebes^: 

' I cry to Thebes to waken, set her hands 
To clasp my wand, mine ivied javelin, 
And round her shoulders liang my wild fawn-skin.' 

Very primitive in form but wholly of the vine-god is the 
xoanon on a krater in the Campana collection of the Louvre^ 




Fig. 131. 



^ Phit. Quaest. 11. cxir. 
3 Eur. Bacch. 55. 



2 Pliny N.H. xvi. 62. 

4 Annali d. Inst. 1862, Tav. d' agg. C. 



vin] Dio7ii/sos as Dendrites 429 

(fig. 131). The image of the god is a column treated as a 
herm, and reminds us that Dionysos was called by the name 
Perikionios, He-about-the-pillar. The two representations in 
figs. 131 and 130 are characteristically different. The rude Satyrs 
have but one way of worshipping their god, they fall upon the 
wine-cup; the Maenads, worshipping the god of life, bend in 
ritual ecstasy to touch the earth, mother of life ; the wine-jar in 
Hieron's vase is present as a symbol, but the Maenads revel 
aloof. 

The woi"ship of the tree-god was probably indigenous in Thrace 
long before the coming of the vine. We have evidence that it 
lingered on there down to Roman times. An inscription on 
a cippus recently discovered in a mosque at Eski Djoumi^ and now 
in the museum at Saloniki affords curious evidence. The cippus 
marked the grave of a priestess of Dionysos. Her name is lost, but 
the word priestess (lepeia) is followed by two characteristically 
Bacchic epithets, Ovaa and eveia. She is priestess of the thiasos 
of the 'Carriers of the Evergreen Oak' {7rpivo<p6poi), and she leaves 
to her guild certain property in vinej^ards. If they do not fulfil 
the conditions of the bequest, including the offering of a wreath of 
roses, the property is to go to another thiasos, that of the 'Carriers 
of the Oak' {ApoLO(f)6pot,), and on the same conditions. 

The tree-god was too simple for the philosopher. He wanted 
to abstract Dionysos, rid him of not only his anthropomorphic 
but his zoomorphic and phytomorphic shapes. Still he used the 
tree-god as a stepping-stone to his ' principle of moisture.' 
Plutarch^ says the Greeks regard Dionysos as not merely lord 
and originator of wine, but of the whole principle of moisture. 
Of this, he adds, Pindar is in himself sufficient witness when he 

says: 

' Of all the trees that are 
He hath his flock, and feedeth root by root, 

The ,Joy-god Dionysos, the pure star 
That shines amid the gatiicring of the fruit.' 

Plutarch is fond of this beautiful little bit of Pindar. He 

1 Perdrizet, Hull, de Corr. Hell. 1900, p. 322. 

^ Phit. de Ls. et Os. xxxv. 6ti S' ov ndvov rod oiuov Aidvvcroi' dWa /cai 7rdcn;s vypds 
(pCiaetas" EWrjves riyovvrixi. Kvpiov Kai dpxvy^" dpKel Uivoapos n-dprvs «r;'ai \iywv 

Aevop^wv oi ubp-ov Ai.6vv<tos TroXvyrjUr]^ av^dvoi 

dyvbv <piyyo% OTrJjpas. 



430 Dionysos [ch. 

quotes it again in his Symposiacs^. A friend who is a farmer 
objects that Plutarch has shut out his calling from the worship 
of the Muses, whereas he had hoped that at least Thalia, goddess 
of increase, might be his to worship. Plutarch says the charge 
is not a just one, for farmers have Dendrites, He-of-the-Trees, 
and Anesidora, She-who-sends-up-gifts ; and then he quotes his 
favourite passage. Pindar is of course no evidence for a Prin- 
ciple of Moisture. Neither poets nor primitive people use any- 
such philosophical jargon; but all the world over primitive man 
did and still does welcome the coming and lament the going of the 
something or someone who makes the trees and plants to grow 
and beasts and man to bring forth. Later, though they are little 
the wiser as to what that something is, they will call it the 
' Principle of Moisture,' or if they are poets Love or Life. 

The ' Principle of Moisture ' was in fashion among theologists 
long before Plutarch. In the Bacchae of Euripides the new wine 
of the religion of Dionysos has to be poured into some very old 
bottles. Teiresias in a typically orthodox fashion, characteristic of 
the timid and kindly priest all the world over, tries to water it 
down with weak rationalism, Dionysos, he urges, is not new at 
all, he is very old, as old and respectable as Demeter herself; she 
is the Principle of Dryness, he of Moisture, nothing could be more 
safe and satisfactory. He thus instructs honest Pentheus'-^: 

'Two spirits there be, 
Young prince, that in man's world are first of worth. 
Demeter one is named. She is the Earth — 
Call her what name thou wilt ! — who feeds man's frame 
With sustenance of things dry. And that which came 
Her work to perfect, second, is the Power 
From Semele born. He found the liquid shower 
Hid in the grape 2.' 

This is the rationalism not of the poet Euripides, but of 
the priest Teiresias. This is clear, for the poet in the next line 
breaks clean away from the tiresome Dryness and Moisture and 
is gone to the magic of sleep and the blood of the God out- 
poured. 

1 Plut. Symp. IX. 14. 4. 2 gur. Bacch. 274. 

^ The doctrine of Teiresias was wide-spread in Greece by the time of Diodorus. 
He says (iv. 3) : KadoXov 5i fj.vdo\oyovai tGiv deQv ixeyidTi^s a.irooo-)(9ji Tvyxo-veLv Trap' 
dvdpuTois Toiis rals evepyeffiais inrf p^aKo/x^vovs Kara T7]v eiipeffiv tQv ayaduiv Aidwadv 
re Kai Arj/j.r]Tpa, tov fxiv tov TTpoa-qpecTTdTov ttotov yevofievov evpirriv, Tr)v 8e ttjs ^T]pas 
Tpocprjs TTf]v KpaTiffTrjv Trapadovaav rcij yivet tCov dvdpwTrwv. 



Yin] Dionysos as BiiU-god 431 

Plutarch quotes Pindar as authority for the Principle of 
Moisture, and undoubtedly the sap of trees and plants sacred to 
Dionysos may have helped out the abstraction. But, had Plutarch 
known it, the notion is associated not so much with Dendrites, the 
Tree-God, as with a figure perhaps still more primitive, Dionysos 
the Bull. 



Dionysos the Bull-God. 

Dionysos Dendrites is easy to realize ; he is but a step back 
from the familiar, canonical Vine-god. The Biill-god Dionysos 
is harder to accept because we have lost the primitive habit of 
thinking from which he sprang. The Greeks themselves suffered 
the like inconvenience. They rapidly advanced to so complete 
an anthropomorphism that in Periclean Athens the dogma of the 
Bull-incarnation was, we cannot doubt, a stumbling-block, a faith 
as far as possible put out of sight. 

The particular animal in w'hich a god is incarnate depends of 
course on the circumstances of the worshippers. If he is in a 
land lion-haunted his god will be apt to take shape as a lion ; 
later the lion will be his attendant, his servitor. Lions attend 
the Mountain-Mother of Asia Minor, guard her as has been seen 
<p. 265) in heraldic fashion, draw her chariot, watch her throned 
In like manner Dionysos, son of Semele, who is but one form of 
the same Earth-Mother, has a chariot drawn by lions (fig. 121), 
and sometimes, though not so frequently as his Mother, an 
attendant lion. 

In the vase-painting in fig. 132 from an amphora in the British 
Museum- Dionysos, with kautharos and great spreading vine, 
stands between tw^o great prophylactic eyes. A little lion looks 
up at him, dog-like, adoring his master. On the reverse 
Hephaistos with his mallet carries the vine in token of the 
liower of the god. The lion in this picture is losing his reality, 
because the lion has ceased to be a dominant terror in Greece. 
The god of a civilized, agricultural people must reincarnate him- 
self in other animal shapes, in the Snake, in the Kid, most of all 
in the Bull. The Bull-god may have been too savage for Periclean 

1 Myth, and Mon. Anc. Athens, pp. 44 — 50. 

- B.M. Cat. B 264. Gerhard, Auserlesene Vasenbilder, Taf. 38. 



432 



Dionysos 



[CH. 



Athens, but Euripides must have found him in full force in 
Macedonia. To a people of goat-herds like the Arcadians the 
goat is the impersonation of life and generation ; to a people of 





Fig. 132, 

cow-herds the bull is the more potent and splendid vehicle. In 
the Bacchae there are Snake-Epiphanies, Lion-Epiphanies, but 
first and foremost Bull-Epiphanies. At the mystery of the Birth ^ 

'A Horned God was found 
And a God with serpents crowned.' 

In the supreme Orphic mystery, to be discussed later (p. 482), 
the worshipper before he became ' Bacchos ' ate the raw flesh of a 
bull, and, probably in connection with this sacrament, the Bull form 
of the god crystallized into a mystery dogma. When Pentheus has 
imprisoned the 'Bacchos' he finds in the manger not the beautiful 
stranger but a raging bull ; the hallucination was doubtless bred of 
ancient faith and ritual. Again when in the Bacchae''^ Dionysos 



1 Eur. Bacch. 99. 



2 Eur. Bacch. 918. 



vin] Dionysos as Bull-god 433 

leads him forth enchanted to his doom on Cithaeron, Pentheus in 
his madness sees before him strange sights : 

'Yea and mine eye 

Is bright ! Yon sun shines twofold in the sky, 
Thebes twofold and the Wall of Seven Gates, 
And is it a Wild Bull this, that walks and waits 
Before me 1 There are horns upon thy brow ! 
What art thou, man or beast ? For siu-ely now 
The Bull is on thee!' 

and last when at the moment of their uttermost peril the Bacchants 
invoke their Lord to vengeance, the ancient incarnations loom in 
upon their maddened minds^ : 

'Appear, appear, whatso thy shape or name, 
Mountain Bull, Snake of the Hundred Heads, 

Lion of the Burning Flame ! 
God, Beast, Mystery, come ! ' 

All this madness is based not only on a definite faith, but that 
faith is the utterance of a definite ritual. In discussing the name 
Bromios we have seen (p. 414) that in the ritual of Dionysos 
in Thrace there were ' bull-voiced mimes ' who bellowed to the 
god. The scholiast- on Lycophron's Alexandra says that the 
' women who worshipped Dionysos Laphystios wore horns them- 
selves, in imitation of the god, for he is imagined to be bull-headed 
and is so represented in art.' Plutarch^ gives more particulars. 
* Many of the Greeks represent Dionysos in their images in the 
form of a bull, and the women of Elis in their prayers invoke the 
god to come to them with his bull-foot, and among the Argives 
there is a Dionysos with the title Bull-born. And they summon 
him by their trumpets out of the water, casting into the depths 
lambs to the Door-keeper ; they hide their trumpets in their 
thyrsoi, as Socrates has told in his treatise on the Hosioi.' A 
bull-god is summoned and he emerges from ivater. 

It will later (p. 49.5) be seen to what strange theological uses 
the Orphics put their bull and lion and snake-shaped Epiphanies ; 
for the present it must be noted how near akin these were to the 
shapes that the Southern Greeks gave to their ow^n indigenous 

1 Eux.Bacch. 1017 

(pavr/di. Tavpos rj iroXvKpavos ISe'iv 

OpaKiOf rj irvpL((>\iyuv bpacrdai \i(jiv. 
- Scliol. ad Lye. Al. 1237 Keparocpopovai yap Kai avrai /caret lilpirjcnv Awvva-ov, 
TavpbKpava yap (pavra^erai Kal ^wypacpHTai. 
'•' Plut. de /»'. et Os. xxxv. 



H. 



28 



434 



Dioiiysos 



[CH. 



gods. Zeus and Athene and even Poseidon had, by the fifth 
century B.C., become pure human shapes, but the ministrants of 
Poseidon at Cyzicus were down to the time of Athenaeus known as 
Bulls\ and lower divinities like rivers still kept their bull shape, 
witness the pathetic story of Deianeira and Achelolis'^ : 

'A river was my lover, him I mean 
Great Acheloiis, and in threefold form 
Wooed me, and wooed again ; a visible bull 
Sometimes, and sometimes a coiled gleaming snake, 
And sometimes partly man, a monstrous shape 
Bull-fronted, and adown his shaggy beard 
Fountains of clear spring water glistening flowed.' 

In those old divine days a wooer might woo in a hundred 
shapes, and a maiden in like fashion might fly his wooing. It is 
again Sophocles^ who tells us of the marriage of Pentheus : 

'The wedlock of his wedding was untold, 
His wrestling with the maiden manifold.' 

The red-figured vase-painting in fig. 133 looks almost like an 
illustration of the Trachiniae^. Here is the monster; but he is 




Fig. 133. 



man-fronted, his body that of a bull, and from his mouth flows 
the water of his own stream Acheloiis. Herakles is about to break 
off his mighty horn, the seat of his strength ; Deianeira stands by 
unmoved. With odd insistence on his meaning the vase-painter 

1 Athen. p. 425 c. ^ ggph. Trach. 9. » Soph. frg. 548. 

* Archciologische Zeitung xvi. (1883), Taf. 11. This vase is now in the Louvre. 



YIIl] 



Diomjsos as Bull-god 



435 



draws in a horn parallel with the stream to show that the 
stream is itself a cornucopia of growth and riches. The vase- 
painting is many years earlier than the play of Sophocles. 

I know of no instance where an actual bull-Dionysos is repre- 
sented on a vase-painting, but in the design in fig. 134 from an 




Fig. 134. 

amphora^ in the Wtirzburg Museum his close connection is indicated 
by the fact that he rides on a bull. From the kantharos in his 
hand he pours his gift of wine. This representation is of special 
interest because on the reverse of the same vase Poseidon holding 
his trident is represented riding on a white bull. This looks as 
though the vase-painter had in his mind some analogy between 
the two divinities of moisture and growth. 

With the bull-Poseidon and the bull river-god at hand, the 
assimilation of the bull-shaped Dionysos would be an easy task, 
the more as he was god of sap and generation and life, as well as 
of wine. Water and wine were blended in theology as in daily 
life, and the Greeks of the South lent the element of water. 



1 Gerhard, Auserlesene Vasenbilder, Taf. 47. 



28—2 



436 Dionysos [ch. 

Dionysos then by his tree-shape and his bull-shape is clearly 
shown to be not merely a spirit of intoxication, but rather a 
primitive nature god laid hold of, informed by a spirit of intoxi- 
cation. Demeter and Kore are nature-goddesses, they have their 
uprisings and down-goings, but to the end they remain sedate 
and orderly. Dionysos is as it were the male correlative of Kore, 
but changed, transfigured by this new element of intoxication 
and orgy. 

This double nature of the god finds expression in one of his 
titles, the cultus epithet of Dithyrambos, and it is only by keeping 
his double aspect clearly in mind that this difficult epithet can at 
all be understood. 

Dithyrambos and the Dithyramb. 

The title Dithyrambos given to Dionysos and the Dithyramb, 
the song sung in his honour, must be considered together ; in fact 
this title like ' lacchos ' seems to have arisen out of the song. 

The epithet Dithyrambos was always regarded by the Greeks 
themselves as indicating and describing the manner of the birth 
of the god. Disregarding the quantity of the vowel i in Di they 
believed it to be derived from At and 6vpa, double door, and took 
it to mean ' he who entered life by a double door,' the womb of his 
mother and the thigh of his father. This was to them the cardinal 
' mystery ' of the birth. So much is clear from the birth-song of 
the chorus in the Bacchae^ : 

'Acheloiis' roaming daughter, 
Holy Dirce, virgin water, 
Bathed he not of old in thee 
The Babe of God, the Mystery ? 
When from out the fire immortal 
To himself his God did take him. 
To his own flesh, and bespake him : 
" Enter now life's second portal. 
Motherless mystery; lo I break 
Mine own body for thy sake. 

Thou of the Two-fold Door, and seal thee 
Mine, Bromios" — thus he spake — 
"And to this thy land reveal thee.'" 

Dithyrambos was ' he of the miraculous birth,' Liknites con- 
ceived mystically. The mistaken etymology need not make us 
distrust the substantial truth of the tradition. 

1 Eur. Bacch. 519. 



vm] Dithi/ramhos and the Dithijramh 437 

As Dithyrambos is the Babe mystically born, so the Dith}Tamb 
was uniformly regarded as the Song of the Birth. Plato states 
this, though somewhat tentatively, in the Laivs\ When discuss- 
ing various kinds of music he says : ' Another form of song, the 
Birth of Dionysos called, I think, the dithyramb.' 

It has already been seen that Dionysos as the principle of life 
and generation was figured as a bull, it is therefore no surprise 
to learn from Pindar- that the Dithyramb ' drives ' the bull : 

' Whence did appear the Charites who siug 
To Dionyse their king 
The dithyramb, the chant of Bull-driving?' 

The Charites here halt half-way between ritual and poetry. 
They are half abstract rhythmical graces, half the Charites of an 
actual cult. The song of invocation to the Bull sung by the 
women of Elis has been already noted. It is the earliest Dithy- 
ramb preserved, and happily in his Greek Questions Plutarch'* has 
left us a somewhat detailed account. He asks, ' Why do the 
women of Elis summon Dionysos in their hymns to be present 
with them with his bull-foot ? ' He goes on to give the exact 
words of the little ritual hymn : 

' Hero, Dionysos, come 
To thy temple-home 
Here at Elis, worshipful 
We implore thee. 
With thy Charites adore thee. 
Rushing with thy bull-foot, come! 
Noble Bull, noble Bull.' 

The fact that ' Hero ' precedes ' Dionysos ' in the invocation 
makes it tempting to conjecture that we have here a superposition 
of cults, that the women of Elis long before the coming of 
Dionysos worshipped a local hero in the form of a bull and that 

1 Plat. Legg. iii. 700 b aWo eWos il)dijs Aiovvffov y4ve<rLi, oltxcu, didvpafi^o^ \ey6fMevos. 

2 Find. 01. XIII. 18 

ral AiuviKyov irddev i^k(JMvev 
ffvu jSorjXdTgi x<^P'"S didvpafi^qj; 

3 Plut. Q. Gr. XXXVI. 

'EX6'eri' -rjpu} Atofi'cre 
'AXetwj' f's vaov, 

€s vaov Tip /3o^(fJ TToSi Ovwv. 

"A^te ravpe, d^ce ravpe. 
These women were also priestesses of Hera and as Dr Sam Wide, ' Chthonische and 
himmlische Gotter ' in Archiv f. IleligiotiswiHseuschaft, x. 1907, p. 263, has I think 
conclusively shown, the two divinities worshipped were the Bull "Hpws and the 
Cow "Rpa. 



438 Diomjsos [ch. 

Dionysos affiliated his cult ; but another possibility is perhaps 
more probable, that Hero is in the hymn purely adjectival. It 
has already been shown that the word meant to begin with only 
' strong ' and then ' strong one.' 

The mention of the Charites is important. They are the givers 
of increase (p. 298), who naturally attend the coming of the life- 
god ; they seem here analogous to the nurses of Dionysos, the 
sober form of his Maenads. They attend alike his coming and 
his birth. 

In the Delphic Paean (p. 416), where the birth of Dionysos in 
the spring is celebrated, the title Dithyrambos^ is first and fore- 
most, before Bacchos, Euios, Braites and Bromios : 

' Come, Dithyrambos, Bacchos, come, 
Euios, Thrysos-Lord, Braites, come, 
Bromios, come, and coming with thee bring 
Holy hours of thine own holy spring. 

Evoe, Bacchos, hail, Paean, hail, 
Whom in sacred Thebes the mother fair, 
She, Thyone, once to Zeus did bear. 
All the stars danced for joy. Mirth 
Of mortals hailed thee, Bacchos, at thy birth.' 

The new-born god is Dithyrambos, and he is born at the resur- 
rection of earth in the spring-time. 

The epithet Paean, belonging to Apollo, is here given to 
Dionysos. At the great festival of the finishing of the temple all 
is to be harmony and peace ; theology attempts an edifying but 
impossible syncretism. Nothing in mythology is more certain 
than that the Paean and the Dithyramb were to begin with poles 
asunder, and it is by the contrast between them that we best 
understand not only the gist of the Dithyramb itself but the 
significance of the whole religion of Dionysos. 

The contrast between Apollo and Dionysos, Paean and Dithy- 
ramb, has been sharply and instructively drawn by Plutarch, 

e[Cie dvp(Tri\pe^, Bpa't'- 
Ta, Upd/JLLle), 7]piva[is IkoO 
Tatcrd{e)'\ lepaTs ev u>pais. 
Ei^ot w io [BaKx' w ie Ilatajj' 
[8]v Qrj^ais ttot' ev euiais 
Zt][vI yeivaTo] KaWiirais Qvwva. 
wdvTei 5' [dcTTepes d.yx\6pev- 
aav, TrdvTe? de ^porol 'X^a.pt)- 
aav (TaFs], Bd^'X(e, yiuvais. 
I have followed throughout Dr H. Weil's version. 



vm] Bithyramhos and the Dithyramb 439 

himself a priest at Delphi. The comparison instituted by Plutarch 
between the rites of Osiris and those of Dionysos has been already 
noted (p. 401). In the discourse about Isis and Osiris\ it will be 
remembered, Plutarch says ' the afifair about the Titans and the 
Night of Accomplishment accords with what are called in the 
rites of Osiris " Teariugs to pieces," Resurrections, Regenerations. 
The same,' he adds, ' is true about rites of burying. The Egyptians 
show in many places burial chests of Osiris, and the Delphians 
also hold that the remains of Dionysos are deposited with them 
near to the place of the oracle, and the Consecrated Ones (ogiol) 
perform a secret sacrifice in the sanctuary of Apollo what time 
the Thyiades awaken Liknites.' In a word, at Delphi there were 
rites closely analogous to those of Osiris and concerned with the 
tearing to pieces, the death and burial of tlie god Dionysos, and 
his resurrection and re-birth as a child-. 

In another discourse {On the Ei at Delphi) Plutarch^ tells us 
that these ceremonials were concerned with the god as Dithy- 
rambos, that the characteristic of the Dithyramb was that it sang 
of these mutations, these re-births, and that it was thereby marked 
off sharply from the Paean of Apollo. The passage is so in- 
structive both as to the real nature of Dionysos and as reflecting 
the attitude of an educated Greek towards his religion that it 
must be quoted in full. Plutarch has been discussing and con- 
trasting Dionysos and Apollo apropos of the worship of Dionysos 
at Delphi, a worship every detail of which he must certainly have 
known. Dionysos, he says, has just as much to do with Delphi as 
Apollo himself, a statement rather startling to modern ears. Then 
he begins to work out the contrast between the two gods after the 
philosophic fashion of his day. Apollo is the principle of simplicity, 
unity and purity, Dionysos of manifold change and metamorphosis. 
This is the esoteric doctrine known to experts, cloaked from the 
vulgar. Among these experts {ao^u>repoL) were probably, as will 
be seen later (p. 462), Orphic theologians. He goes on to tell 
how these esoteric doctrines were expressed in popular ritual. 
He of course inverts the natural order of development. He 

1 Plut. de Is. et Os. xxxv. 

2 For a curious and very interesting survival of the passion-play of Dionysos 
see E. M. Dawkins, ' The modern carnival in Thrace and the cult of Dionysos,' 
J.H.S. 1906, p. 191. 

3 Plut. de Ei ap. Delph. ix. 



440 Dioni/sos [CH. 

believes that the doctrine known only to the few gave rise to 
a ritual intended to express it in popular terms for the vulgar ; 
whereas of course in reality the ritual existed first and was then 
by the experts made to bear a mystical meaning. Bearing this 
proviso in mind Plutarch's account is full of interest. ' These 
manifold changes that Dionysos suffers into winds and water and 
earth and stars and the births of plants and animals they enigma- 
tically term "rending asunder" and "tearing limb from limb"; 
and they call the god Dionysos and Zagreus and Nyktelios and 
Isodaites, and tell of certain Destructions and Disappearances 
and Resurrections and New-Births which are fables and riddles, 
appertaining to the aforesaid metamorphoses. And to him (i.e. 
Dionysos) they sing dithyrcmihic measures full of sufferings and 
metamorphosis, which metamorphosis has in it an element of 
wandering and distraction. For " it is fitting," as Aeschylus says, 
that " the dithyramb of diverse utterance should accompany 
Dionysos as his counterpart, but the ordered Paean and the 
sober Muse should attend Apollo." And artists in sculpture 
represent Apollo as ever young and ageless, but Dionysos they 
represent as having many forms and shapes. In a word, they 
attribute to the one uniformity and order and an earnest simplicity, 
but to the other a certain incongruousness owing to a blend made 
up of sportiveness and excess and earnestness and madness. They 
invoke him thus : 

"Euios, thou Dionysos, who by the flame of thy rite 
Dost women to madness incite.'" 

Plutarch goes on to tell of the division of the ritual year 
at Delphi between Apollo and Dionysos. Apollo as incoming 
conqueror has taken the larger and the fairer portion. 

' And since the time of the revolutions in these changes is 
not equal, but the one which they call Satiety is longer, and the 
other which they call Craving is shorter, they observe in this 
matter a due proportion. For the remainder of the year they use 
the Paean in their sacrificial ceremonies, but at the approach of 
winter they wake up the Dithyramb and make the Paean cease. 
For three months they invoke the one god (Dionysos) in place of 
the other (Apollo), as they hold that in respect to its duration the 
setting in order of the world is to its conflagration as three to one.' 

Plutarch's use of technical terms, e.g. conflagration (Jkitv- 



viii] Thriamhos and Thriae 441 

pwai^), betrays that he is importing into his religious discussion 
philosophic speculations, and especially those of Heraclitus. Into 
these it is unnecessary to follow him ; the impoi'tant points that 
emerge for the present argument are that the Dithyramb was 
a ritual song sung in the winter season, probably at festivals 
connected with the winter solstice, of an orgiastic character and 
dealing Avith the god as an impersonation of natural forces, dealing 
with his sufferings, his death and resurrection, and as such con- 
trasted with the sober simple Paean. In a word the Dithyramb, 
and with it the title Dithyrambos, resume the two factors that 
we have detected in the religion of Dionysos, the old spirit of 
life and generation, and the new spirit of intoxication. 

It remains to enquire if any light can be thrown on the difficult 
etymology^ of the word. 

The popular etymology, that saw in Dithyrambos the god-of- 
the-double-door, is of course impossible. Dithyrambos, all philo- 
logists agree, cannot etymologically be separated from its cognate 
thriamhos, which gave to the Latins their word tnumphus. The 
word tliriamhos looks as if it were formed on the analogy of ianibos. 
It may be that Suidas^ among his many confused conjectures as 
to the meaning of the word throws out accidentally the right clue. 
He says ' they call the madness of poets thriasis! May not 
thriamhos mean the mad inspired orgiastic measure ? The first 
syllable with its long i may possibly be referred to the root At 
already discussed under Diasia (p. 23). At a time when in 
etymology the length of syllables was wholly disregarded the At 
in Ato9 might help out the confusion, and last some brilliant 
theologian intent on edification thought of the double doors. 
Mythology has left us dim hints as to the functions of certain 
ancient maiden prophetesses at Delphi called Thriae. May 
they not have been the Mad Maidens who sang the mad song, 
the thriamhos ? 

' The suggestion that follows as to the connection of the word Dithyramb with 
Thriae is only given tentatively. It is also possible tliat the word Ditliyramb may 
be of foreign origin. Epiphanius (Adv. Haeres. vol. i. bk iii. p. 1093 d) tells of 
a goddess in Egypt, worshipped with orgiastic rites under the name Tl6pa/j.l3os. 
She was akin to Hecate (dWoi oe rjj TiHpd/x[i(f} 'EiKa.rT]v epfxijiievo/j.^vrji'). TiDpa/xjios 
may have come with other orgiastic elements from Crete to Thrace (see p. 459). 

- Suidas s.v. X^yovai yap dpiaaiu ttjv twv ttoitjtCjv ixavlav. Suidas also suggests 
connection with dpla fig-leaves, 17 dTrd tov dpta, to. <pO\\a t-^s ctvktjs dvaKeifi^vris t<^ 
Aiovvaii}. In view of Mr Paton's investigations, Jirv. Arch. 1907, p. 51, this 
derivation spite of quantity seems possible. 



442 Diom/sos [ch. 

Of the Thriae we are told by Philochoros^ that they were 
nymphs of Parnassos, nurses of Apollo. Save for this mention we 
never hear that Apollo had any nurses, he was wholly the son 
of his father. Is it not more probable that they were nurses of 
Dionysos ? 

The account of these mysterious Thriae given in the Homeric 
Hymn^ to Hermes is strange and suggestive. Hermes is made to 
tell how his first gift of prophecy came not from Zeus, but from 
three maiden prophetesses : 

Tor there are sisters born, called Thriae, maiden things, 
Three are they and they joy them in glory of swift wings. 
Upon their heads is sprinkled fine flour of barley white. 
They dwell aloof in dwellings beneath Parnassos' height. 
They taught me love of soothsaying, while I my herds did feed, 
Being yet a boy. Of me and mine my father took no heed. 
And thence they flitted, now this way, now that, upon the wing, 
And of all things that were to be they uttered soothsaying. 
What time they fed on honey fresh, food of the gods divine. 
Then holy madness made their heai'ts to speak the truth incline, 
But if from food of honeycomb they needs must keep aloof 
Confused they buzz among themselves and speak no word of sooth.' 

The Thriae are nurses like the Maenads, they rave in holy 
madness (Ovtovaiv) like the Thyiades, but their inspiration is not 
from Bacchos, the wine-god, not even from Bromios or Sabazios or 
Braites, the beer-gods ; it is from a source, from an intoxicant yet 
more primitive, from honey. They are in a word ' Melissae^' 
honey-priestesses, inspired by a honey intoxicant ; they are bees, 
their heads white with pollen ; they hum and buzz, swarming 
confusedly. The honey service of ancient ritual has already been 
noted (p. 91), and the fact that not only the priestesses of 
Artemis at Ephesus were ' Bees,' but also those of Demeter, and, 
still more significant, the Delphic priestess herself was a Bee. 
The oracle of the Bessi (p. 369) was delivered by a priestess, and 
the analogy with Delphi is noted by Herodotus ; may not the 
priestess of the Bessi have also been a Bee ? The Delphic 
priestess in historical times chewed a laurel leaf, but when she 
was a Bee surely she must have sought her inspiration in the 
honeycomb. 

1 Philocb. frg. 125 ap. Zenob. prov. cent. v. 75, ^i\6xop6s cpiqaiv on vvp.ipai KaTelxov 
rbv llapvatjcrbv rpocpoi ^ Air6Wuvo% rpeis KoXovfievai Qpiai, d<p' we ai fxavriKoi ^J/rjcpoi 
dpial KoXovvTai. 

2 Horn. Hymn, ad Merc. 551 — 563. I accept Hermann's reading Qpiai for 
MoTpai, cf. GemoU ad loo. 

•* For Bee-goddesses and Bee-priestesses see Dr Neustadt's interesting monograph 
De love Cretico, ni. De Melissa dea. 



vni] 



The Thriae 



443 



^^.^gfTOBTOfg 




Fig. 135. 



With all these divine associations about the bee, a creature 
wondrous enough in nature, it is not surprising that she was 
figured by art as a goddess and half human. In fig. 135 we have 
such a representation \ a woman with high 
curled wings and a bee body from the waist 
downwards. The design is from a gold 
embossed plaque found at Camiros. 

When Euripides would tell of the dread 

power of Aphrodite haunting with her 

doom all living things, Aphrodite who 

was heir to all the sacred traditions of the 

Earth-Mother, the image of the holy bee 

comes to his mind charged with mysterious 

associations half lost to us. He makes the chorus of maidens in 

the Hippolytus sing- : 

' O mouth of Dirce, O god-built wall 
That Dirce's wells run under; 
Ye know the Cyprian's fleet foot-fall, 
Ye saw the heavens round her flare 
When she lulled to her sleep that Mother fair 
Of Twy-born Bacchus and crowned her there 

The Bride of the bladed thunder, 
For her breath is on all that hath life, and she floats in the air 
Bee-like, death-like, a wonder.' 

The thriambos^ was then, if this conjecture be correct, the song 

of the Thriae or honey-priestesses, a song from the beginning like 

the analogous Dithyramb confused, inspired, impassioned. The 

title Dith}Tambos through its etymology and by its traditional use 

belonged to Dionysos, conceived of in his twofold aspect as the 

nature-god born anew each year, the god of plants and animals as 

well as of human life, and also as the spirit of intoxication. It 

remains to ask what was the significance of such a god to the 

Greeks who received him as an immigrant from the North. How 

far did they adopt and how far modify both elements in this 

strange and complex new worship ? 

^ For a full account of ' the Bee in Greek Mythology ' see Mr A. B. Cook, J.H.S. 
XV. 1895, p. 1. - Eur. Hipp. 555. 

^ $pia/jL^os translated by the Romans into the plain prose of ' triumph ' seems to 
have remained to the Greeks a poetical word consecrated to poetical usage. Conon 
says indeed of Tereus in telling the story of Philomela : T^p.vei ttjv avTrjs yXGxrcrav 
oeSiws rbv (k XSyuv dpiaii^ov (Narrat. xxxi.), but the story and the usage of the 
word seem borrowed from some poetical source. Sir Richard Jebb kindly drew 
my attention to the fact that in our earliest literary mention of the thriamhos 
(Kratinos, Koch frg. HOl it is apparently sung by a female singer: 
6t€ <jv tovs KaXoiit Opidfi^ovs dvapVTovff' dTrrjxOdvov. 



444 Dionysos [ch. 

First, what significance had Dionysos to the Greeks as a nature- 
god, in his animal and vegetable forms as bull and tree ? 

Long before the coming of Dionysos the Greeks had nature- 
gods : they had Demeter goddess of the corn, they had Poseidon 
Phytalmios god of the growth of plants, they had the Charites 
givers of all increase. But it should be distinctly noted that all 
these and many another nature-god had passed into a state of 
complete anthropomorphism. They represent human rather than 
merely physical relations, they have cut themselves as far as possible 
loose from plant and animal nature. Demeter is far more mother 
than corn. Hermes is the young man in his human splendour, 
and spite of his Herm-form and phallic worship has well nigh 
forgotten that he was once a spirit of generation in flocks and 
plants. Athene, like her mother the earth, had once for her 
vehicle a snake (p. 305), but she has waxed in glory till she 
comes to be a motherless splendour born of the brain of Zeus, an 
incarnate city of Athens. These magnificent Olympians have 
shed for ever the slough of animal shapes. Dionysos came to 
Greece at an earlier stage of his development when he was still 
half bull half tree, and this earlier stage was tolerated, even 
welcomed, by a people who had themselves outgrown it. 

It is not hard to see how this came to be. Man when he 
worships a bull or a tree has not, even to himself, consciously 
emerged as human. He is still to his own thinking brother of 
plants and animals. As he advances he gains but also loses, and 
must sometimes retrace his steps. The Greeks of the sixth 
century B.C. may well have been a little weary of their anthropo- 
morphic Olympians, tired of their own magnified reflection in the 
mirror of mythology, whether this image were distorted or halo- 
crowned. They had taken for their motto ' Know Thyself,' but at 
the fountain of self-knowledge no human soul has ever yet 
quenched its thirst. With Dionysos, god of trees and plants as well 
as human life, there came a ' return to nature,' a breaking of bonds 
and limitations and crystallizations, a desire for the life rather of 
the emotions than of the reason, a recrudescence it may be of animal 
passions. Nowhere is this return to nature more clearly seen than 
in the Bacchae^ of Euripides. The Bacchants leave their human 

1 See Mr Gilbert Murray, Euripides, p. Ixvii. 



VIIl] 



The 'Return to Nature' 445 



homes, their human work and ordered life, their looms and 
distaffs, and are back with the wild things upon the mountains. 
In token of this their hair flows loose, they clothe themselves with 
the skin of beasts, they are girt with snakes and crowned with ivy 
and wild briony, and leaving their human babes they suckle the 
young of wolves and deer' : 

'And one a young fawn held, and one a wild 
Wolf-cub, and fed them with white milk and smiled 
In love, young mothers with a mother's breast, 
And babes at home forgotten.' 

Euripides, it maybe, utters his own longing to be free from the 
tangle and stress of things human, but it is into the mouths of 
the chorus of Maenads that he puts the lovely song- : 

'Will they ever come to me, ever again, 

The long, long dances. 
On through the dark till the dim stars wane ? 
Shall I feel the dew on my throat and the stream 
Of wind in my hair? Shall our white feet gleam 

In the dim expanses '\ 
feet of a Fawn to the greenwood fled, 
Alone in the grass, and the loveliness; 
Leap of the Hunted, no more in dread, 

Beyond the snares and the deadly press. 
Yet a voice still in the distance sounds, 
A voice and a fear and a haste of hounds, 
.0 wildly labouring, fiercely fleet. 

Onward yet by river and glen — 
Is it joy or terror ye storm-swift feet ? — 
To the dear lone lands untroubled of men, 
Where no voice sounds, and amid the shadowy green 
The little things of the woodland live unseen.' 

Nor is it only that the Maenads escape from their humanity to 
worship on the mountain, they find there others, a strange congre- 

sration, that worship with them^: 

^ ^ 'There 

Through the appointed hour, they made their prayer 

And worship of the Wand, with one accord 

Of heart, and cry " lacchos, Bromios, Lord, 

God of God born ! " And all the mountain felt 

And worshipped with them; and the wild things knelt, 

And ramped and gloried, and tlie wilderness 

Was tilled with moving voices and dim stress.' 

This notion of a return to nature^ is an element in the worship 

1 Eur. Bacch. 699. - Ih. 862. ^ Ih. 723. 

■* Nietzsche has drawn in this respect a contrast, beautiful and profoundly true, 
between the religion and art of Apollo and Dionysos. Apollo, careful to leniain his 
splendid self, projects an image, a dream, and calls it (jod. It is illusion {Schein), 
its watchword is limitation (MauHn), Know thyself. Nothing too much. Dionysos 



446 Dionysos [ch. 

of Dionysos so simple, so moving and in a sense so modern that 
we realize it without effort. It is harder to attain to anything 
like historical sympathy with the second element — that of intoxi- 
cation. 

It is not easy to deal with the worship of Dionysos without 
rousing in our own minds an instinctive protest. Intoxication to 
us now-a-days means not inspiration but excess and consequent 
degradation ; its associations are with crime, with the slums, with 
hei'editary disease, Avith every form of abuse that abases man, not 
to the level of the beasts but far beneath them. 

In trying to understand how the Greeks felt towards Dionysos 
we must bear in mind one undoubted fact. The Greeks were 
not as a nation drunkards. Serious excess in drink is rare 
among southern nations, and the Greeks were no exception to the 
general rule. When they came in contact with northei-n nations 
like the Thracians, who drank deep and seriously, they were sur- 
prised and disgusted. 

Of this we have ample evidence, much of it drawn from the 
discussion in the Deiimosophistae of Athenaeus^ on Wine and 
Wine-cups. The general tone of the discourse, while it is strongly 
in favour of drinking, is averse to drunkenness. ' The men of old time 
were not wont to get drunk.' The reason given is characteristically 
Greek ; they disliked the unbridled license that ensued. It was well 
said by the inventors of proverbs, ' Wine has no rudder.' Plato ^ in 
the sixth book of the Laws said it was unfitting for a man to drink 
to the point of drunkenness, except on the occasions of festivals of 
that god who was the giver of wine. An occasional and strictly 
defined license under the sanction of religion is widely different 
from a general habit of intemperance. In the first book of the 
Laws^, in speaking of various foreign nations Northern and Oriental, 
e.g. Celts, Iberians, Thracians, Lydians and Persians, he says 
' nations of that sort make a practice of drunkenness.' 

The Greek habit of drinking was marked off from that of the 
Thracians by two customs, they drank their wine in small cups 

breaks all bonds; his motto is the limitless Excess (Uebermaass), Ecstasy. Das 
Individuum mit alien seinen Grenzen und Maassen ging hier in der Selbstvergessenheit 
der dionysischen Zustfmde unter, und vergass die apollinischen Satzungen (Nietzsche, 
Die Gehiirt der Tragodie, p. 37). 

1 Ath. XI. 31 p. 427. - Plat. Legg. p. 775. =* jj. p_ 637, 



viii] Intoxication rare among Greeks 447 

and they mixed it freely with water. One of the guests in 
Athenaeus remarks^ that it is worth while enquiring whether the 
men of old times drank out of large cups. ' For,' he adds, 
' Dicaearchus the Messenian, the disciple of Aristotle, in his dis- 
course on Aleaeus says they used small cups and drank their wine 
mixed with much water.' He goes on to cite a treatise ' On 
Drunkenness ' by Chamaeleon of Heracleia, in which Chamaeleon 
stated not only that the custom of using large cups was a recent 
one but that it was imported from the barbarians. Imported 
indeed but never really naturalized, for he goes on to say, ' They 
being devoid of culture rush eagerly to excess in wine and 
provide for themselves all manner of superfluous delicacies.' It 
is clear that in respect of wine and food as of everything else the 
Greek was in the main true to his motto ' Nothing too much.' 
Drunkenness was an offence in his eyes against taste as well as 
morals. 

Large drinking cups were a northern barbarian characteristic^ ; 
they were made originally of the huge horns of the large breed 
of cattle common in the North, they were set in silver and 
gold, and later sometimes actually made of precious metals and 
called rhyta. Chamaeleon goes on to say, ' in the various regions 
of Greece neither in works of art nor in poems shall we find any 
trace of a large cup being made save in such as deal with heroes.' 
That to the dead hero was allowed even by the Orphics the 
guerdon of ' eternal drunkenness ' will be seen later (Chap. XI.), but 
the living hero only drank of large cups of unmixed wine out of 
ceremonial courtesy to the Northerner. Xenophon in the seventh 
book of the Anabasis describes in detail the drinking festival 
given by the Thracian Seuthes. When the Greek general and 
his men came to Seuthes they embraced first and then according 
to the Thracian custom horns of wine were presented to them. 
In like manner the Macedonian Philip pledged his friends in 
a horn of wine. It was from silver horns that the Centaurs 
drank (p. 385). A fiatterer and a demagogue might drink deep 
for his own base purposes. Of the arch-demagogue Alcibiades 
Plutarch^ says: 'At Athens he scoffed and kept horses, at Sparta 
he went close-shaved and wore a short cloak and washed in cold 

1 Ath. XI. 4 p. 461. 2 Ath. xi. 51 p. 470. 

* Plut. De adul. et amic. vii. 



448 



Diomjsos 



[CH. 



water, in Thrace he fought and drank.' War and drink, Ares and 
Dionysos, have been in all ages the chosen divinities of the 
Northerner. Diodorus^ in speaking of ceremonial wine-drinking 
makes a characteristically Greek statement : ' They say that those 
who drink at banquets when unmixed wine is provided invoke the 
Good Genius, but when after the meal wine is given mixed with 
water they call on the name of Zeus the Saviour ; for they hold 
that wine drunk unmixed produces forms of madness, but that 
when it is mixed with the rain of Zeus the joy of it and the 
delight remain, and the injurious element that causes madness 
and license is corrected.' The Good, or perhaps we ought to call 
him ' Wealthy,' Spirit is the very essence of the old wine-god of 
Thrace and Boeotia ; the blending with the rain of Zeus is the 
taking of it over to the mildness and temperance of the Greek 
character. 

Excess was rare among the southern Greeks, and, even when 
they exceeded, because they were a people of artists they 
euphemized. No one but a Greek could have conceived the 
lovely little vase-painting from an oinochoe in the Boston Museum 




Fig. 136. 



of Fine Arts'-^ in fig. 136. A beautiful maiden is the centre 
of the scene. She is a worshipper of Dionysos. In her left 
hand is a tall thyrsos and she holds the cup of Dionysos, the 



1 Diod. IV. 3. 

- Boston Museum Annual Report, 1901, p. 60, No. 20. 
Helbigiana, p. 111. 



P. Hartwig, Strena 



viii] S2)iritHal Intoxication 449 

kantharos, in her right. It is empty, and she seems to ask the 
Satyr who stands before her to refill it from his oinochoe. But 
he will not, she has had too much already. Over her beautiful 
head, slightly inclined as if in weariness, is inscribed — and who 
but a Greek Avould have dared to write it ? — her name ' Kraipale.' 
Behind her comes a kindly sober friend bearing in her hand a hot 
drink, smoking still, to cure her sickness. 

Perhaps because the extreme of drunkenness, its after degra- 
dation and squalid ugliness, was rare among the Greeks, they were 
better able to realize that in its milder forms it lent lovely motives 
for art. Wine by the release it brings from self-consciousness 
uuslacks the limbs and gives to pose and gesture the new beauty 
of abandonment. Degas has dared to seize and fix for ever the 
beauty he saw in that tragedy of degradation — a woman of the 
people besotted by absinthe. The peeping moralist that lurks in 
most of us intrudes to utter truth beside the mark and say that 
she is wicked. To the Greek artist there was no such extreme 
issue between art and morality. To him, whether poet or vase- 
painter, to drink and fall asleep was if not a common at least 
a beautiful experience, one he painted on many a vase and sang 
in many a song. A festival without the grace and glory of wine 
would to him have been shorn of well nigh all its goodliness. 
On this it is needless to insist. To him peace and wine and sleep 
are playfellows loving and lovely^ : 

' Eyelids closed and lulled heart deep 
In gentle, unforbidden sleep, 
Street by street the city brims 
AVith lovers' feasts and burns with lovers' hymns.' 

Another point remains to be noted. Not only did the Greeks 

mix their Thracian wine with water, tempering the madness of 

the god, but they saw in Dionysos the god of spiritual as well as 

physical intoxication. It cannot be forgotten that the drama was 

early connected with the religion of Dionysos ; his nurses are not 

only Maenads, they are Muses ; from him and him only comes the 

beauty and magic of their song : 

'Hail Child of Semele, only by thee 
Can any .singing sweet and gracious be.' 

The contrast between sheer Thracian madness and the Athenian 

1 Bacchyl. Paean, Bergk 13, trans, by Mr D. S. MacColl. 
H. 29 



450 



Dmiysos 



[CH. 



notion of inspiration is very clearly seen in the two figures of 
Dionysos as represented on the two vase-paintings in fig. 137 and 
fig. 138, vase-paintings roughly contemporaneous, the first in the 




Fig. 137. 



style of Hieron, the second in that of Brygos. In fig. 137 from a 
red-figured stamnos^ in the British Museum we have the Thracian 
Dionysos drunk with wine, a brutal though still splendid savage ; 
he dances in ecstasy brandishing the fawn he has rent asunder in 
his madness. In the second picture^ (fig, 138), a masterpiece of 
decorative composition, we have Dionysos as the Athenian cared 
to know him. The strange mad Satyrs are twisted and contorted 
to make exquisite patterns, they clash their frenzied crotala and 
wave great vine branches. But in the midst of the revel the god 

1 Brit. Mus. Cat. e 439, pi. xv. On the reverse a Satyr plays the flute to his 
master's dancing. 

- Biblioth^que Nationale, Cat. 57(5, P. Hartvvig, Meisterschalen, xxxiir. 1. 



vm] Ecstasy aufl Asceticism 451 

himself stands erect. He holds no kauthaios, only a great lyre. 




i'lG. 138. 

His head is thrown back in ecstasy; he is drunken, but with music, 
not with wine. 

Again, with the Maenad worshippers there is the same trans- 
formation. 

The delicate red-figured kotylos^ in fig. 139 from the National 

Museum in Athens is like a little twofold text on the double aspect 

of the worship of Dionysos. On the obverse is a Maenad about to 

execute her old savage ritual of tearing a kid asunder. In a 

moment she will raise her bent head and chant-': 

' glad, glad on the Mountains 
To swoon in the race outworn, 
When the holy fawn -skin clings 
And all else sweeps away, 
To the joy of the quick red fountains, 
The blood of tlie hill-goat torn, 
The glory of wild-beast ravenings 
Where the hill-top catches the day, 
To the Phrygian, Lydian mountains 
'Tis Bromios leads the way.' 

' Athens, Nat. Mas. Inv. 3442. Bull, de Con: Hell. xix. 1895, p. 94. 
- Eur. liaccli. 135. 

29—2 



452 * Dioiiysos [ch. 

On the reverse for counterpart is a sister Maenad. She dances 




Fig. 139. 



in gentle ecstasy, playing on her great timbrel, 
service of the Muses, and she might sing^: 



She is all for the 



'But a better land is there 

Where Olympus cleaves the air, 
The high still dell, where the Muses dwell, 

Fairest of all things fair. 
O there is Grace, and there is the Heart's Desire, 
And peace to adore thee, thou Spirit of guiding Fire.' 



There are some to whom by natural temperament the religion 
of Broraios, son of Semele, is and must always be a dead letter, if 
not a stumbling-block. Food is to such a troublesome necessity, 
wine a danger or a disgust. They dread all stimulus that comes 
from without, they would fain break the ties that link them with 
animals and plants. They do not feel in themselves and are at 
a loss to imagine for others the sacramental mystery of life and 
nutrition that is accomplished in us day by day, how in the faint- 
ness of fasting the whole nature of man, spirit as well as body, 
dies down, he cannot think, he cannot work, he cannot love ; how 
in the breaking of bread, and still more in the drinking of wine, 
life spiritual as well as physical is renewed, thought is re-born, 
his equanimity, his magnanimity are restored, reason and morality 

■ 1 Eur. Bacch. 409. 



xo 



vm] Ecstasy and Asceticism 45 

rule again. But to this sacramentalisui of life most of us bear 
constant, if partly unconscious, witness. We will not eat with 
the man we hate, it is felt a sacrilege leaving a sickness in body 
and soul. The first breaking of bread and drinking of wine 
together is the seal of a new friendship ; the last eaten in silence 
at parting is more than many words. The sacramental feast of 
bread and wine is spread for the newly married, for the newly 
dead. 

Those to whom wine brings no inspiration, no moments of 
sudden illumination, of wider and deeper insight, of larger human 
charity and understanding, find it hard to realize what to others of 
other temperament is so natural, so elemental, so beautiful — the 
constant shift from physical to spiritual that is of the essence of 
the religion of Dionysos. But there are those also, and they are 
saintly souls, who know it all to the full, know^ the exhilaration of 
wine, know what it is to be drunken with the physical beauty of 
a flower or a sunset, with the sensuous imagery of words, with the 
strong wine of a new idea, with the magic of another's personality, 
yet having known, turn away with steadfast eyes, disallowing the 
madness not only of Bromios but of the Muses and of Aphrodite. 
Such have their inward ecstasy of the ascetic, but they revel with 
another Lord, and he is Orpheus. 



CHAPTER IX. 

ORPHEUS. 
' noAAoi M6N NApOHKoctJupoi, n^f poi Ae xe Bak)(oi.' 

Mythology has left us no tangle more intricate and assuredly 
no problem half so interesting as the relation between the ritual 
and mythology of Orpheus and Dionysos. 

By the time of Herodotus^ the followers of Orpheus and of 
Bacchus are regarded as substantially identical. In commenting 
on the taboo among the Egyptians against being buried in woollen 
garments he says : 'In this respect they agree with the rites which 
are called Bacchic and Orphic but are really Egyptian and Pytha- 
gorean.' The identification is of course a rough and ready one, 
an identification of race on the precarious basis of a similarity of 
rites, but one thing is clear to the mind of Herodotus — Orphic 
and Bacchic and Egyptian rites are either identical or closely 
analogous. The analogy between Orpheus and Bacchus passed by 
the time of Euripides into current' language. Theseus^ when he 
would taunt Hippolytus with his pseudo-asceticism says : 

' Go revel thy Bacchic rites 
With Orpheus for thy Lord,' 

and Apollodorus^' in his systematic account of the Muses states 
that Orpheus 'invented the mysteries of Dionysos.' The severance 
of the two figures by modern mythologists has often led to the 
misconception of both. The full significance, the higher spiritual 
developments of the religion of Dionysos are only understood 

1 Herod, ii. 81 ofioXoyeova-L 5e ravra roicn 'OpipiKotai. KoKe vfxevot.cn /cat BaKXiKOtcrt, 
eovdi 5e Ai7i'7rTioicrt /cat UvOayopeioiffi. 
-^ Eur. Ilqjp. 954 

'Op(f)^a T ai'a/cr' 'ix'^v 
^OLKxeve. 
3 Apollod. I. 3. 2. 3. 



CH. ix] Orpheiis a Thradan 455 

through the doctrine of Orpheus, and the doctrine of Orpheus 
apart from the religion of Dionj'sos is a dead letter. 

And yet, clearly linked though they are, the most superficial 
survey reveals differences so striking as to amount to a spiritual 
antagonism. Orpheus reflects Dionysos, yet at almost every point 
seems to contradict him. The sober gentle musician, the precise 
almost pedantic theologist, is no mere echo, no reincarnation 
of the maddened, maddening wine-god. Diodorus expresses a 
truth that must have struck every thinker among the Greeks, 
that this real and close resemblance veiled an inner, intimate 
discrepancy. He says\ in telling the story of Lycurgus, ' Charops, 
grandfather of Orpheus, gave help to the god, and Dionysos in 
gratitude instructed him in the orgies of his rites; Charops handed 
them down to his son Oiagros, and Oiagros to his son Orpheus.' 
Then follow the significant words : ' Orpheus, being a man gifted 
by nature and highly trained above all others, made many 
modifications in the orgiastic rites : hence they call the rites that 
took their rise from Dionysos, Orphic' Diodorus seems to have 
put his finger on the secret of Orpheus. He comes later than 
Dionysos, he is a man not a god, and his work is to modify the 
rites of the god he worshipped. 

It is necessary at the outset to emphasize the humanity of 
Orpheus. About his legend has gathered much that is miraculous, 
and a theory^ has been started and supported with much learning 
and ability, a theory which sees in Orpheus an underworld god, 
the chthonic counterpart of Dionysos, and that derives his name 
from chthonic darkness {6p(^vq). This is to my mind to mis- 
conceive the whole relation between the two. 



Orpheus as Magical Musician. 

Like the god he served, Orpheus is at one part of his career a 
Thracian, unlike him a magical musician. Dionysos, as has been 
seen (p. 451), played upon the lyre, but music was never of his 
essence. 

In the matter of Thracian music we are happily on firm 

' Diod. III. G5 TToXXo, /xeradeivai ruiv iv rots dpyioit. 

- E. Maass, Orpheun. To Dr Maass's learned book I owe much, but I ain 
reluctantly compelled to differ from his main contention, that Orpheus is a god. 



456 Orpheus [CH. 

ground. The magical musician, whose figure to the modern mind 
has almost effaced the theologist, comes as would be expected 
from the home of music, the North. Conon^ in his life of 
Orpheus says expressly, ' the stock of the Thracians and Mace- 
donians is music-loving.' Strabo- too is explicit on this point. 
In the passage already quoted (p. 414), on the strange musical 
instruments used in the orgies of Dionysos, he says : ' Similar to 
these (i.e. the rites of Dionysos) are the Kotyttia and Bendideia 
practised among the Thracians, and with them also Orphic rites 
had their beginning.' A little further he goes on to say that the 
Thracian origin of the worship of the Muses is clear from the places 
sacred to their cult. ' For Pieria and Olympus and Pimplea and 
Leibethra were of old Thracian mountains and districts, but are 
now held by the Macedonians, and the Thracians who colonized 
Boeotia consecrated Helicon to the Muses and also the cave of the 
Nymphs called Leibethriades. And those who practised ancient 
music are said to have been Thracians, Orpheus and Musaeus and 
Thamyris, and the name Eumolpus comes from Thrace.' 

The statement of Strabo is noticeable. As Diodorus places 
Orpheus two generations later than Dionysos, so the cult of the 
Muses with which Orpheus is associated seems chiefly to prevail 
in Lesbos and among the Cicones of Lower Thrace and Mace- 
donia. We do not hear of Orpheus among the remote inland 
Bessi. This may point to a somewhat later date of development 
when the Thracians were movins^ southwards. That there were 
primitive and barbarous tribes living far north who practised 
music we know again from Strabo. He tells^ of an Illyrian tribe, 
the Dardanii, who were wholly savage and lived in caves they 
dug under dung-heaps, but all the same they were very musical 
and played a great deal on jjipes and stringed instruments. The 
practice of music alone does not even now-a-days necessarily mark 
a high level of culture, and the magic of Orpheus was, as will later 
be seen, much more than the making of sweet sounds. 

Orpheus, unlike Dionysos, remained consistently a Northerner. 
We have no universal spread of his name, no fabulous birth stories 
everywhere, no mystic Nysa ; he does not take whole nations by 
storm, he is always known to be an immigrant and is always of 

^ Conon, Narr. xlv. (pCKofxovffov to QpaKwv Koi 'SiaKedoviov yevos. 
- Strabo, x. 3 § 722. ' ■■ Strabo, vii. 7 § 315. 



ix] Otylieiis as Macfical Musician 457 

the few. At Thebes we hear of magical singers Zethus and 
Amphion, but not of Orpheus. In Asia he seems never to have 
prevailed ; the orgies of Dionysos and the Mother remained in 
Asia in their primitive Thracian savagery. It is in Athens that 
he mainlv re-emerses. 



To the modern mind the music of Orpheus has become mainly 
fabulous, a magic constraint over the wild things of nature. 

'Orpheus with his lute made trees 
And the mountain tops that freeze 
Bow themselves when he did sing.' 

This notion of the fabulous music was already current in 
antiquity. The Maenads in the Bacchae^ call to their Lord to 
come from Parnassos, 

' Or where stern Olympus stands 

In the elm woods or the oaken, 
There where Orpheus harped of old, 
And the trees awoke and knew him, 
And the wild things gathered to liini, 

As he sang among the broken 
Glens his music manifold,' 

and again in the lovely song of the Alcestis'-, the chorus sing 

to Apollo who is but another Orpheus : 

'And the spotted lynxes for joy of thy song 
Were as sheep in the fold, and a tawny throng 
Of lions trooped down from Othrys' lawn, 
And her light foot lifting, a dappled fawn 
Left the shade of the high-tressed pine, 
And danced for joy to that lyre of thine.' 

In Pompeian wall-paintings and Graeco-Roman sarcophagi it 
is as magical musician, with power over all wild untamed things 
in nature, that Orpheus appears. This conception naturally 
passed into Christian art and it is interesting to watch the 
magical musician transformed gradually into the Good Shepherd. 
The bad wild beasts, the lions and lynxes, are weeded out one 
by one, and we are left, as in the wonderful Ravenna^ mosaic, 
with only a congregation of mild patient sheep. 

It is the more interesting to find that on black and red- 
figured vase-paintings, spite of this literary tradition, the power 
of the magical musician is quite differently conceived. Orpheus 

1 Eur. Bacch. o60. - Eur. Ale. 579. 

■' In the Churcli of S. Apollinaie in Classe. See Kurth, Mosailcen von der 
chrii'tlich. Era, Taf. xxvii. 



458 



Orpheus 



[CH. 



does not appear at all on black-figured vases — again a note of his 
late coming — and on red-figured vases never with the attendant 
wild beasts. 

On a vase found at Gela and now in the Berlin Museum ^ 
reproduced in fig. 140, we have Orpheus as musician. He wears 
Greek dress and sits playing on his lyre with up-turned head, 
utterly aloof, absorbed. And round him are not Avild beasts bub 




Fig. 140. 



wild men, Thracians. They wear uniforml}^ the characteristic 
Thracian dress, the fox-skin cap and the long embroidered cloak, 
of both of which Herodotus^ makes mention as characteristic. 
The Thracians who joined the Persian expedition, he says, ' wore 
fox-skins on their heads and were clothed with various-coloured 
cloaks.' These wild Thracians in the vase-painting are all intent 
on the music ; the one to the right looks suspicious of this new 
magic, the one immediately fticing Orpheus is determined to 
enquire into it, the one just behind has gone under completely;